Les visiteurs: La révolution (2016)

(On TV, May 2022) All right, I give up – Les visiteurs: La révolution is my third dud in a row in the Les visiteurs series, and I have to recognize that the very basics of this trilogy simply don’t grab me. If I had to guess, it would be that the series’ celebration of French history is the sticking point. It’s even more pronounced this time around, as the time-displaced heroes of the series find themselves not in modern times but poking around the French Revolution, mixing time periods and having fun with elements that should be familiar with European audiences… and are utterly baffling to French-Canadian ones. (I can’t even rationalize that I should know about the period as part of my ancestral history, considering that both main trunks of my family tree left France almost a century before the French Revolution.)  Absent any reason to care about the on-screen shenanigans, I’m left with a laborious comedy that can’t even sustain simple gags for too long. It doesn’t help that watching a third (or fourth, if you include the American remake) instalment in a series means that if you’ve missed the onboarding, you’ve missed a lot. It’s easy to recognize that the film is playing jokes with its own mythology (with the characters meeting their own descendants), but it doesn’t help if you care so little about previous films that this one doesn’t spark either. The result, no matter why, is uninvolving, overlong and only fitfully amusing. Apparently, my disappointment is hardly unique – Les visiteurs: La révolution also got terrible reviews overseas. That doesn’t improve anything, but it does make me feel less alone.