Il était une fois les Boys [When We Were Boys] (2013)

(On TV, December 2020) When you’ve squeezed the lemon dry on a franchise with four instalments, when the actors are becoming noticeably older than the roles they should be playing, when you’re already banking on a specific demographic, when there’s producer pressure to keep churning them out no matter what, there’s really only one solution: A prequel! After a fifteen-year run of four movies and a five-season TV series following the episodic adventures of middle-aged French-Canadian hockey fans who still play to the best of their abilities, the Les Boys franchise couldn’t really go anywhere else: by flashing back to 1967 in Il était une fois les Boys, it gets to tell an origin story and revel in the baby boomers’ near-mythical Year of Our Centenary, while keeping some of the characterization and flashing forward loudly enough to make viewers rewatch the other instalments. It works, but on a rote level: Sure, it’s nostalgic and likable, but there’s also a sense that it’s not really earning audience sympathy as much as it’s purchasing it by cultural callbacks, a tragic act break (this instalment is markedly more dramatic than the other, especially toward the end), and pointing back to the other instalments of the franchise. It’s clever in that way, I suppose: the French-Canadian film market is small, and any way to goose up box-office receipts can be fair game. At least Il était une fois les Boys seems to have been the capstone to the franchise: Seven years later, it’s still the latest word in the series.