French Fried Vacation 3: Friends Forever (2006)

The idea of reuniting these infamous fellows was not necessarily a good one. Sure, they made us laugh a good deal 25 years ago with their precise and exquisite sense of humor. Sure, their portrayal of the bigger segment of French society was dead-on. Of course, their bad manners and mean-spirited friendships contributed to propel them to stardom. But the very reasons why we enjoyed watching their mediocrity was that they weren't stars. They were a quasi-unknown bunch on the margin of French culture. They were successful because they distanced themselves from both bourgeois mentality and the counter-culture allowing for their insolent brains to come up with such familiar characters. That was last century. And between the late seventies and 2006, they've grown to be the very establishment of mainstream French comedy, something that hardly makes for good, right-on insolence.

So the movie feels at times nostalgic but always superficial. As if the actors had become the characters and in the process had lost the necessary distance to make us laugh.