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Shut Up! (2003)

Director: Francis Veber

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From Time Out London

Since his early masterpiece ‘Pain In The Arse’, Francis Veber, primarily as writer, occasionally as director, has been the genius behind many of the funniest French comedies and filmed farces of the last four decades, including such cheeky pleasures as ‘La Cage aux Folles’, ‘Three Fugitives’ and ‘Le Dîner de Cons’. His stock-in-trade is PC-tickling, broad knockabout duo- or trio-based character comedy tied to tightly scripted narratives, spot-on timing and slaying reaction shots. These are all present and correct in his highly enjoyable Paris-set latest – which limps here three years late – a criminal caper that harps back in many ways to that first triumph, this time with cow-eyed Jean Reno and strawberry-nosed Gérard Depardieu as the hard man/idiot couple playing off each other with the same delicious stupidity as did Lino Ventura and Jacques Brel 30-odd years ago. Okay, ‘Tai Toi!’ isn’t exactly sophisticated entertainment: if you don’t find Depardieu’s electric-shock hair do funny, you’ll probably hate it. Among the excellent support, Richard Berry gives good deadpan as the police commissaire and André Dussollier is superb as the prison psychiatrist who unwittingly unites the fifth arrondissement’s sharpest, most silent, criminal brain with its dumbest, most talkative ox.

Author: Wally Hammond

Time Out London Issue 1886: October 11-18 2006

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