Veteran French film-writer and director Francis Veber (The Closet, My Father the Hero has here crafted a French comedy which deserves to cross the language-barrier and win a mass audience.
Quentin, played immaculately by Jean Reno (Leon, aka The Professional, Ronin), is a taciturn professional criminal who, when arrested, has just one aim -- to escape prison and punish the crime-boss who has murdered his girlfriend.
There's just one snag. He meets Ruby (Gerard Depardieu, star of almost every French movie of the past 20 years). Ruby is a genial giant blessed with monumental, almost moron-level stupidity. He talks incessantly. And because Quentin is the first fellow-prisoner he's met who doesn't try to physically shut him up, Ruby becomes convinced that he's met his bestest-everest friend.
Quentin has laid a beautifully-conceived escape plan. But just at the perfect moment (for Ruby, that is), Ruby intercedes and drags Quentin along as an unwilling participant in his own escape-plan.
What follows is an often hysterically funny odyssey across metropolitan France by these two unlikely companions -- Quentin desperately trying to ditch Ruby; Ruby making sure that these partners remain inseparable.
The film is let-down very slightly by what I felt was an anti-climactic ending. But for most of the time it's a delightful criminal romp. Jean Reno is as quietly professional as in Leon, but the real eye-opener is Gerard Depardieu, who looks as if he's lost 10 stone and 20 years -- he's back in top-form and looks set to dominate the French film industry for another couple of decades.
All we needed to make this movie complete was a guest appearance by Daniel Auteil, just to give us a quinella of the ruling aristocracy of French cinema. But two out of three is enough to let director/writer Francis Veber concoct a comic souffle which is quite magnifique. It's a worthy successor to his modern classic comedy, The Closet.
We get a choice of three soundtracks -- DTS Surround, Dolby Surround or Dolby Stereo; all in French.
Strangely, I found the Dolby Surround slightly richer and warmer and preferable to my ears, though the DTS may have been just a tad more detailed. There are only a few moments during the movie where Surround sound was fully employed -- most aural action is confined to the frontal-stage.
This is a great rental DVD. Be sure to rent it just to see how the old craft of character-filled comedy is alive and well in France.
Of course, you'll have to buy it if you're fans of two of the best actors working today anywhere in the world -- Gerard Depardieu and Jean Reno. What a great double-act!
