Les Anges gardiens [Guardian Angels] (1995)

(On Cable TV, August 2022) If I have one persistent complaint about French-language cinema (European or Canadian), it’s that it seems to have a specific problem keeping a consistent tone. Maybe it’s a mark of amateurism compared to the decades of accumulated Hollywood screenwriting experience. Maybe the French language is inherently more volatile than English (note: I don’t seriously believe this). Maybe the audiences don’t care as much. But Les anges gardiens certainly brings credence to my theory—it starts as a Hong Kong gangster action comedy before becoming a supernatural good-versus-evil-angels farce, and that barely hints at the way the film abruptly swerves from one emotional register to another, even landing into something like a poor-little-girl-lost maudlin moment toward the end. This being said, it’s not completely frustrating to watch. Committed performances from Gerard Depardieu and Christian Clavier (anticipating their collaboration on two Asterix/Obelix films) as, respectively, a nightclub owner and a Catholic priest elevate the material, and there’s a surprising abundance of special effects (not all of them equally successful), large-scale stunts and decent action sequences. The film was a massive box-office success in France upon release, but reviews weren’t so kind. There’s certainly a feeling that the script could have used a lot of tightening up to feel like more than two collections of semi-related sequences glued together: the lack of tonal control bleeds into a lack of crisp plot progression, and digressions that feel as if they go nowhere, inflating the film’s running time for no reason. (For the record—I liked the first half a lot better than the second.)  Les anges gardiens is lively and not unwatchable, but you can feel the potential left unrealized.