"The Return of the Three Brothers" was a depressing experience, it made me realize how badly my favorite comedians have aged and how I've aged too in the process.
The film had me meditating on that famous De Gaulle phrase "old age is a wreck"... that wreck reaches Titanic proportions when it comes to comedy... it struck the comical legend Louis De Funès who had lost half of his physicality by the time the Gendarmes films only made hardcore fans chuckle. It didn't spare the Splendid Troop whose third opus "Les Bronzés: Friends For Life" was a cataclysmic turkey. But who could have ever thought that the most emblematic trio of the 1990s: Bernard Campan, Pascal Légitimus and Didier Bourdon aka "the Unknowns" would be responsible for that series of comedic platitudes, running gags that get short of breath after the second occurrence and funny twists you can see coming like a clown running with a big custard pie... There were occasional laughs and a few good ones, so I laughed at times, I cringed even more...
The film is set twenty years after the events that had the three half-brothers but full-rascals end up serving a sentence in an orphan house. Twenty years is long enough a span to expand the possibility of their becoming, and in a way we're not surprised to see that old habits died hard. Pascal has struck gold again and lives in a luxurious villa with a sexagenarian (Vivienne Vernes), Didier is like La Fontaine's fox depending on a naive woman he despises but keeps on flattering, betting on the death of her wealthy mother as imminent as Michel Serrault's in "The Annuity". And well Bernard has moved beyond the sleaze industry but that's not saying much, he's doing a one-man show in one of these diner clubs when you serve one punchline between the gratin for table 22 and the mimosa eggs of the 13 (they did that joke in a sketch called "Parisian shows").
It seems like the three brothers have difficulties to cut the ombilical chord, two depend on 'nurturing' women and one is still a big child. It doesn't get better when you dig on their situations. Pascal has turned into a gigolo for a woman whose gargantuesque sexual appetite forces him to drink one shot of 'energizer'. Bernard pretends to be a teacher in a prestigious Parisian prep school while he's just selling sex toys on-line. These backdrops set us up for some funny gags but I expected more. In the first film (and yes, there had to be comparaison), each brother had his own circle, with the exception of Bernard but that was the point, he was the only true underachiever and the least hypocritical over his status as a parasite. Anyway, when these 'worlds' clashed, they made spark of hilarity. Think of Didier when he terminates his contract with the stuck-up, conservative Rougemont (Pierre Meyrand) before kicking the dog, or Pascal's disastrous dinner with his boss (Bernard Farcy), a moment of pure hilarious awkwardness.
Such moments lacked in the film. All we got was Pascal speaking ill of his woman at the worst possible timing, with the obligatory "she's not behind me, is she?" trope. As for Didier, the darkness of the humor might unsettle a few viewers, he might be greedy but with murderous impulses? The biggest mistake the film commits is to take for granted our sympathy toward the three brothers, mixing them with their real-life players. It's precisely because I like and admire the three comedians that I hate to see them mixed up in projects that insult their intelligence before getting to ours. They might have overestimated their popularity and thought the come-back was enough an argument to bring viewers to theaters.
As the film seems to have been written with that opportunistic mindset in mind, it inevitably forgot to have supporting characters, that's what the first film had. It wasn't about Les Inconnus, but Farcy, Meyrand, Elie Semoun, the notary, the judicial officer... there were no small parts. In the sequel, even the bigger parts didn't work. The idea of adding an unknown daughter through Sara (Sofia Lesaffre) should have been in dispute. Did we need another representative of the French hood? Was she there to represent the youth perspective? Or just for the sake of the gag that involved her mother and the secret loves she secretly had with the three brothers? Or was she there to fill the ethnic quota? Couldn't they just stick to Antoine du Merle who makes his come-back as Michaël too late in the film to make us care, and he was actually good in his part.
The film had an interesting way to recycle the first plot with another administrative mishmash about the heritage (and a cameo from comedian Jarry as a banker) and perhaps the best running gag is that no matter how hard they'll try, they'll never get a break, the final gag I must admit it was a fun conclusion despite or maybe because of its cheerful corniness. Still, the path to that conclusion is made of many uninspired moments, or wrongly inspired from what made the first film. I'm sorry but I found nothing funny in the sight of Bourdon (who's gained at least forty pounds) ululating like a harem girl and teasing a scared Arab couple, it's not offensive except if you considered good taste as the offended thing. A running gag involves some slogans behind a bank and is wasted for one simple reason: it would have worked better if they didn't notice it. But no, that gag insisted upon itself to the point I could see that the Unknowns had lost their comedic flair.
Ironically, right after the film, the channel rerun the first opus and I could see how infinitely superior it was, they were younger, not too subtler and their message was carried by the gags. That poor sequel unfortunately had no message, and not many gags..
