Caius Nocturne

An incredible spy movie parody that skewers the suave spy cliche by framing him as the equivalent of the old guy who stares at women on the bus and trapping you with him for a feature length movie. It makes for a surprisingly workable comedy, and makes you not complicit with how he behaves. 

So much of this non-complicity comes from how OSS 117 is painfully stupid and unfunny to everyone he meets. He's like a dude in an RPG who constantly rolls a 1 in speech checks. Everyone near him looks at him as if he dropped trou and took a massive shit in public. It also helps that people around him try to correct him on his ignorant views and they just fail to penetrate - he is in a world of his own.

Being forced to be with him and especially be forced to sit in the middle all of the conversations he kills for the entire movie, along with him being blatantly terrible at his job creates extremely fertile ground for cringe comedy.

One of this movie's major strengths is lead actor Jean Dujardin. He has an amazing range of emotions and expressions in this rendition of OSS 117, more than the actors he's parodying. Every time he makes the time to pause and laugh at a fucking terrible joke he makes when nobody else is always gets me.

This movie doesn't just effectively deploy edgy humor in a way that effectively allows us to laugh at misogyny and racism, it also manages to use his extremely stupid adventures to say something about imperialism and the imperial powers of the time.

A ridiculously stupid movie that had me laughing so much throughout. Watch it!!

I feel like I need to say this to really outline the level of movie we're working at - THEY GOT AN NSA AGENT TO DOWNLOAD AN EMAIL ATTACHMENT IN A PHISHING EMAIL.

Wonderful cinematography, married to a really bad script with really terrible sound design. If it wasn't for Michael Mann's aesthetic and those aesthetic levels being off the charts, I would have stopped watching halfway through.

In this movie, the NSA and FBI have security practices that are worse than your average office IT room, there's a terribly crowbarred romance arc, and an overwhelming lack of point to the scale and casualties to the whole thing once you get to the end. I was laughing or gasping in disbelief multiple times at really cringe dialogue or plot choices and as the finale reared its head, I was sort of slouched back, waiting for it to get on with it already. The only moments that kind of woke me up were where the camera work was doing something really cool and interesting and AESTHETIC.

I'm not a person to notice sound design much because I don't really have even a small amount of knowledge or experience, but there were many instances of obviously bad ADR, and so many sound effect choices that were extremely basic and wrong - like someone subtly opening a pocket knife only for the sound effect to be a big echoey *schwing!!* like a sword being brandished in a fantasy film. Completely takes you out of the moment.

This is such a rough movie, the production is so all over the place that I feel like I can't call it anything other than below average. Oof.