Louis-José Houde

  • Le sens de l’humour [A Sense of Humour] (2011)

    Le sens de l’humour [A Sense of Humour] (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) One of the defining characteristics of French-Canadian society is its fondness for comedians — stand-up comedians, stage comedians, TV comedians or movie comedians, with a considerable amount of crossover between the four. The prototypical French-Canadian blockbuster often features one or two familiar comedians, plus a premise riffing off suspense tropes with a comic attitude. Le sens de l’humour is clearly in that vein, as it stars comic superstars Louis José Houde, Michel Côté and Benoit Brière in a film where a strong thriller premise is played for laughs. Here, two touring stage comedians (House and Côté) make fun of someone they shouldn’t during a show… and find themselves kidnapped by a serial killer eager for comedy lessons. Quite a bit of the film’s middle act delves into a meta-deconstruction of humour itself, as the stand-ups try to teach likability and humour principles to someone strikingly inept at it. There’s more, of course — the third act is all about absolving the “serial killer,” introducing a bigger threat and somehow defusing it while not having the rest of the film teetering into a more serious vein. Parts of it certainly work — the three leads have rapport, and the smaller-scale set-pieces can be funny. What doesn’t work quite as well is the conclusion, which has trouble resolving all of the impossible subplots it has created for itself. But those issues scarcely mattered at the film’s release: Le sens de l’humour was the second highest-grossing French-Canadian film of 2011, coming very closely behind Starbucks (which was remade in Hollywood as Delivery Man) — another lighthearted film featuring a well-known comedian.

  • Menteur [Liar] (2019)

    Menteur [Liar] (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2020) French-Canadian absurdist comedy Menteur takes a fantasy concept (an inveterate liar suddenly wakes up in a world where his lies have become truth) and runs with it as far as it can. Perennial French-Canadian marquee name Louis-José Houde leads the film along with Antoine Bertrand, but the fun here is in the script’s comic invention—even if the result is a bit too scattershot to be completely satisfying. The first part is generally more interesting than the second, which seems to escalate matters into a disappointing dead-end. Still, this is the kind of film that the French-Canadian cinema industry does best: a fast-paced crowd-pleaser comedy, not particularly refined but able to deliver what it intends to.

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

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

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • De père en flic [Father and Guns] (2009)

    De père en flic [Father and Guns] (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2010) For such a small market, Québec cinema has proven uncommonly adept at finding the recipes required to get audiences in theatres.  In this case, take a respected actor with a good track record (Michel Côté), pair him off with a hip comic (Louis-José Houde), put them in a situation that combines family comedy with criminal intrigue and watch the results.  As is the case with nearly any other Québec comedy hybrid, the film is first played for laughs, and then for criminal thrills.  The movie’s entire middle third is spent yakking it up at a remote camp for estranged fathers-and-sons, with mud-wrestling, Gen-X/Boomer generational complaints and occasional reminders that there is a hostage drama going on elsewhere.  Only De père en flic‘s first and last minutes are concerned with the cops-versus-criminals premise, which is just as well given how it’s the comedy rather than the thrills that made this film such a success at the French-Canadian box-office.  It actually works pretty well: The script may occasionally indulge its stars in going for the cheap laughs, but the generational conflicts have more substance that you’d expect from a light summer comedy, and actually have something to say about today’s Québec.  De père en flic may be a far better farce than a criminal thriller, but that’s not much of a problem.