La Très très grande entreprise (2008) - film review

Naterris, a huge multinational agrochemicals company, is prosecuted for polluting a stretch of water in an unspoiled region of the South of France.    After two years of acrimonious legal wrangling, Naterris agrees to pay a derisory amount to those local residents whose lives have been ruined by what has happened.  Whilst most of the residents accept the pay off, four refuse.   Zaccharias, Mélanie, Denis and Kevin - respectively an oyster farmer, accountant’s assistant, restaurant owner and blue collar worker – are determined that Naterris should be brought to book.  But time is not on their side.  They have just thirty days in which to infiltrate the Paris headquarters of the corporate giant and find the evidence they need to win their case...

Going by its title you’d be forgiven for thinking that La Très très grande enterprise is a big budget sequel to Pierre Jolivet’s previous hit comedy-drama Ma petite entreprise (1999), but sadly this is not the case.  Whilst there are similarities between the two films - both are respectable examples of what has come to be known as ’social comedy’ revolving around an implausible heist - Jolivet’s latest offering is an inferior beast compared with his earlier triumph, a mix of parody espionage thriller and gutsy sideswipe at the worst excesses of big business.  Actually, it feels more like a cross between Mission Impossible and Cédric Klapisch’s 2002 comedy L’Auberge espagnole, complete with distracting post-production effects and nauseating soundtrack.  It might also be mistaken for a live action version of Scooby Doo (minus the famous pooch) and could conceivably be marketed under the title: Scooby’s Gang Versus the Dastardly Villains of Corporate Greed.  As entertaining as the film is, it is unlikely to win many awards for subtlety.  In their struggle to extract humour from a ludicrously far-fetched scenario, Jolivet and his screenwriter Simon Michaël (a former cop who worked on the ever-popular Ripoux films) leave absolutely no caricature and silly plot contrivance unturned.  You can’t help thinking the film might have fared somewhat better if its contributors had taken it just a little more seriously...

If you can stomach the absurd, wafer-thin characterisation and comicbook-style plot (which stretches credibility way, way beyond breaking point), La Très très grande enterprise is an enjoyable romp, if only for the gusto that the four enterprising leads - Roschdy Zem, Marie Gillain, Jean-Paul Rouve and Adrien Jolivet - bring to the film.  Forget the plot - that just seems to be one ginormous, industrial scale MacGuffin.  What makes the film worth watching is the interplay of the four characters as they work to overcome their differences and try to form an effective team, with little hope of success - think of it as a Gallic spoof of The Apprentice.  The four likeable principals are clearly enjoying themselves too much, but that does the film little harm, as it manages to break the fourth wall quite effectively without their connivance.  Former French footballer Vikash Dhorasoo makes an amusing cameo appearance, presumably to complete the bumper set of caricatures the film manages to accumulate in its rambling 102 minutes runtime.  

As a piece of social commentary, La Très très grande enterprise is as toothless as an octogenarian crocodile with a life-long addiction to Pepsi-Cola, but as it chews up the clichés and spits them in our face the film does at least raise a smile or two (albeit smiles on a face that is drenched in half-digested clichés).  Quite what the moral of the film is meant to be is anyone’s guess - probably: (a) if you are an evil mega-corporation with secrets to hide, try to be more imaginative in your choice of passwords and don’t keep your incriminating documents right next to a photocopier; (b) if you want to distract a security guard whilst you carry out an ingenious heist, make sure you give him a copy of a classic French heist movie beforehand which he can watch whilst you are performing the heist; and (c) if you are the kind of numbskull who never backs up your computer files onto CD, it is probably not a good idea to load onto your computer a CD from someone who you know has every reason to corrupt your entire file system.  If its authors had managed to avoid the sobriety bypass which they suffered before making this film, it might have had something sensible to say about the futily of bringing profit-hungry conglomerates to book (even conglomerates whose security procedures seem to have been devised by the Marx Brothers) - but alas this little pearl of wisdom seems to have got lost along the way.

© filmsdefrance.com 2011

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