De Père en flic 2 [Father and Guns 2] (2017)

(In French, On TV, July 2019) As a French-Canadian cinephile who almost exclusively watches foreign movies (understandable: In good years, only half a dozen French-Canadian releases sell more than 100,000 tickets and even the local movie theatre shows maybe one French-Canadian release per month), it’s not unpleasant to go back to the homegrown stuff and watch a movie that speaks my language, takes place around here and features actors that I’ve seen over and over again. De Père en flic 2 has the distinction of being the most popular French-Canadian film of 2017, with roughly 680,000 admissions and $5M in grosses. It’s a relatively big-budget follow up to the 2009 original which was also a box-office success, and it features both veteran Québec movie superstar Michel Côté and wildly popular comedian Louis-José Houde as father and son cops who compete professionally to catch a mob boss. In an attempt to recreate the premise of the first film, the plot is shamelessly manipulated so that both protagonists find themselves at a couple’s retreat in order to get a confession out of their target. Since this is a mainstream comedy, De Père en flic 2 spends a third of its time on a passable cop thriller, and the rest on grimacing antics featuring a bunch of seasoned comedians milking the couples-therapy premise for all it’s worth. It actually works well … although I wonder how well it travels outside Québec’s border with its unapologetic French-Canadian blend of bilingual dialect, pop-culture references, familiar sights and uniquely local references. At least the film is decently paced, which is crucial for a comedy: aside from some weird editing and blurry CGI due to the film’s relatively low budget by American standards, writer-director Émile Gaudreault gets his jokes neatly lined up in a row and even manages to put together a few cinematic sequences (most clearly the dance sequence) on its way to the conclusion. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and favourably compare it to that other Québec cop comedy sequel of 2017, the far more disappointing Bon Cop Bad Cop 2.