听 At least we know who to blame: French TV celeb Laurent Baffie who writes, directs, produces and stars in this torturously unfunny farce about a man who's lost his car keys. It's a slim excuse for a movie - something suggested by almost every famous actor in France, who appear as themselves in the film's first few minutes refusing to have anything to do with it. But Baffie seems to think acknowledging how rubbish your movie is makes it funny. He's mistaken.
If Dude, Where's My Car? was remade in Paris by two middle-aged duffers as Monsieur, Where's My Car Keys?, it would offer more comic mileage than this Gallic nonsense. Spending 90 minutes searching for your keys - when the audience already knows they're in your left trouser pocket - isn't hilarious, it's terminally tedious. So, Baffie throws in dancing dolphins, a cantankerous Gerard Depardieu and a crying, plasticine dog in a desperate attempt to fill the vacuum left after the lobotomy of his comic imagination.
"DON'T GO - IT'S CRAP!"
"You won't be taking that trash to the Cannes Film Festival," complains Baffie's tubby co-star Daniel Russo, finally fed up with film's self-conscious asides on the filmmaking process, the difficulties of script structure and the need for allegory. Even the passing Parisians who the filmmakers vox pox about the film's events seem bemused by its complete dearth of entertainment value. Maybe that's why the original French poster carried the upfront tagline: "Don't go - it's crap!" Like everything else in this movie, it's not a joke.
In French with English subtitles.
French film French humour; we are definitely different from you
