L’Entente cordiale (2006) - film review

Crooked arms dealer Viktor Zilenko steals a revolutionary microchip which, when implanted into a soldier, makes him impervious to pain.  Zilenko intends to sell the chip back to the Russians through the intermediary of the French secret service.   François de la Conche, an aristocratic secret agent, is sent to London to undertake the transaction, accompanied by a hired interpreter Jean-Pierre Moindreau.  During the exchange, Zilenko and his men are attacked by rival agents, and only de la Conche and Moindreau survive the ensuing massacre.  In the confusion, the chip gets injected into Moindreau’s arm.  Unless it is removed within 12 hours, the chip will cause the interpreter to explode!

Entente cordiale is the latest in a series of French parody thrillers which plumb the depths of juvenile humour in an almost calculated attempt to drive the public away from cinema theatres whilst ruining the reputations of some perfectly respectable actors.  To describe the film as mindless, delinquent, incoherent nonsense of the most excruciatingly inept kind would hardly do it justice.  It is, in addition to all these choice adjectives: tedious, derivative, smug, insulting and caricatured to an unquantifiable extent.  And, to be frank, those are just some of its better points...

It is scarcely credible that with so many big name actors and with all the resources available to the technical crew, a film could possibly end up as bad as this.  Daniel Auteuil is about as big a casting mistake as you can imagine – just what is he doing in this film?  Throughout, he looks totally unengaged by what he’s doing, and you could be forgiven for thinking that he walked onto the wrong set one day and the director wouldn’t let him go.  At least Christian Clavier is somewhat more convincing in the role of an aristocratic secret agent, but he isn’t funny, has no charm, and looks like an actor whose career is seriously on the skids.  Then there are a host of cameo appearances, ranging from John Cleese to Jennifer Saunders, each actor so obviously chosen to match a particular stereotype of the most grotesquely simplistic kind – again, not funny.

Then there’s an idiotic schoolboy comic book plot that doesn’t go anywhere, endless attempts at humour that fall flat (mainly because the jokes are too obvious, vulgar and asinine), and the most off-putting visual design imaginable, with action sequences that look like a cross between a bad parody of Tarantino and a TV ad for some unidentifiable product. You’d almost think the objective of the jump-cutting/CGI-obsessed editing and post-production team was not to help create a coherent narrative, but rather to give the audience a mass migraine.

There really is nothing – absolutely nothing – good about this film.  It’s just yet another painfully bad attempt to spice up the comedy thriller genre – and it is an unmitigated disaster.

© James Travers 2007

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