In French (2004)This is a light romantic comedy with broad, physical humor. I laughed out loud several times, and enjoyed it all the way to the end.
Roy Dupuis plays Vincent Papineau, an inept burglar who accidentally runs afoul of the Marseilles Mafia. As he is trying to evade them, he cuts his hair and shaves his beard, and is promptly mistaken for a cop named Claude Laurin. With bad guys chasing him and Claude conveniently away on an extended vacation, Vincent takes over Claude's job and apartment and romances Claude's pretty partner on the force, while trying to figure out how to appease the Mafia and benefit financially from the whole situation.
Even though you can see a lot of the situations coming a mile off, (particularly when Claude finally shows up, as we know he will), this movie is a lot of fun. Although I prefer him doing drama, Dupuis can definitely handle comedy and he is terrific in both roles. One of my perennial complaints about many of Roy Dupuis' movies is that there isn't enough of him, but I can't say that here. He is in almost every scene of this movie, and sometimes twice.
I would like to complain about the lack of English subtitles on the DVD, though. Yes, this was a joint Quebec/France production, but Roy Dupuis is a Canadian star. Isn't Canada a major market for this movie? What were they thinking? I know enough French to follow the plot and I thought it was fairly easy to understand what was going on even if you don't speak French, but I still would have liked to catch all of the subtleties.
Lots of fun. Three out of four stars,
Billie
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Billie Doux loves good television and spends way too much time writing about it.
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