Search - Oss 117: Lost in Rio (Ws Sub) on DVD

"Some people have adventures. I AM an adventure!"

Trevor Willsmer | London, England | 09/10/2010

(3 out of 5 stars)

"While OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies was one of the smartest and silliest spoofs to come off the Continent in years, sadly this followup falls into the all-too familiar sequel trap of, having used up its best gags first time round, playing up variations on the same but a bit larger in the hope that the overplaying will make the material funnier. Much of the time it doesn't.

Not that Jean Dujardin's wonderfully smug, xenophobic and heroically unaware reinvention of Jean Bruce's (serious) 50s-60s spy isn't still a wonderfully obnoxious creation - the kind of person who doesn't think Brazil is a dictatorship because the weather is too nice, thinks hippies are people who have sex with horses, Judaism is "a religion that forbids sausages" and who blithely goes into the German embassy to ask for a list of prominent ex-Nazis, he's anti-Semitic, sexist, De Gaullist (there's one wonderfully uncomfortable pause when the subject of French collaborators is raised) and so entrenched in his bourgeois values that he even beats up a Nazi's son for badmouthing his war criminal father.

But while there are some fun moments en route to its North by Northwest inspired climax on Rio's giant statue of Christ the Redeemer, not least an inspired hospital chase where Dujardin and the villain wake up in the same hospital ward, it doesn't quite work enough of the time this time round. Some ideas are better on paper than the screen, such as the opening that takes the notion of the 'expendable' Bond girls to near-Apocalyptic extremes, but unlike the first film it never looks and feels right. Whereas Cairo went to remarkable lengths to recreate not just the production design, wardrobe, directorial style and even film stock of 60s spy movies, aside from the film's plentiful split-screen montages this often feels more like video than film, taking it out of the time it was set. But while that may be a simply cosmetic sin, more troublesome is the way that parts of the film often drag and feel underdeveloped. There's still enough in the film that's fun to make it worth a look, but with too few standout gags and not enough genuine panache to stop it from being a disappointing step down from the original.
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