Éric Judor

(On Cable TV, January 2021) My expectations for La tour Montparnasse infernale were correct but still underwhelmed: I was expecting a French comic take on The Towering Inferno and that’s more or less what I got… except that the laughs weren’t as plentiful as I hoped for. I suppose that much of the disconnect comes from the very specific type of comedy from lead duo Éric Judor and Ramzy Bedia, a well-oiled team that clearly plays to their strengths here, even though the result may prove to be too dumb for some and alien for others. Familiarity with French culture is a must—in my case, I knew just enough to realize how much I missed in order to make sense of the result. It’s an aggressively, proudly dumb kind of comedy that takes from its betters (especially Die Hard, which remains funnier than this parody) but doesn’t manage to improve on it: The plot has stupid window washers foiling a high-rise hostage situation/robbery, but the script never flies too high. The reliance on French pop-culture references makes the result incomprehensible at times (a Wikipedia trawl clarifies some of them, but too late for most viewers), while the slapdash production values don’t really make the film pop in its limp action sequences. La tour Montparnasse infernale was a box-office success back in 2001, but it’s hard for contemporary non-French audiences to properly appreciate what the fuss was about: we simply lack most of the cultural references to even make sense of it and the film doesn’t have many additional cinematic qualities to make it worth anything on its own absent the prior knowledge required to enjoy what’s on the screen.