Les deux mondes

Les Duex Mondes is a great idea, with lots of entertaining elements that does not quite pull together as a perfect narrative. Despite its imperfections this is certainly a very entertaining film

History of a genius by a genius writer. Our hero switches, beyond his will, from our world to another dimension, where he is hailed as the messiah. How will this average man build a new personality to take on the challenge? A genius is the one who comes back from another world to speak to us. With this script, the director has managed to become one. And what a joy to see Benoit Poolvorde demonstrates once again how great an actor he is. There is in Benoit, and in this movie, flamboyance, humor, creativity, emotion, realism and everything needed to end up with a perfect story. But beware: to understand the movie and experience its greatness, you have to become the hero yourself. Only once you fully accept it could happen to you, will everything come to light.

Les Deux Mondes or Two Worlds is initially intriguing, beguiling and like Time Bandits has a nice take on time travel, anthropology, and finding your life again.

Sounds great.

And in places it is. However, and for us it's a big however, it all loses its way half way through and becomes even somewhat clichéd.

Never boring, it is a fairly interesting watch, but it fails to carry its own premise to really interesting places- it just simply runs of out steam and ends up looking like a computer game of Civ in places...

An interesting attempt sure, with some brilliance at the beginning, but by the time the tribes have resolved their differences in the other world we're only a third of the way through the film and there's just not enough arc left to carry this to a great destination.

Watchable, but lacks the real punch that would have lifted this beyond its great start...

Les Deux Mondes is another intelligent French comedy, this times using fantastic elements (like multi dimension traveling) but mostly interested on human behavior and social acceptance. Remy, (the outstanding and always restrained Benoît Poelvoorde) is a common passive person. He works as an art restaurateur, but expend most of his time taking care of his kids while his wife (one of those big idealist) is trying to save the world, traveling around with a handsome doctor, but forgetting his family completely. In a different universe, a tribe under slavery is conjuring magic to get the great wizard who will defeat and kill the giant king terrorizing them and free them. Yes, as you probably imagined, Remy is the great wizard and savior. Traveling from one world to the other constantly, Remy has to deal with his upcoming divorce (his wife is leaving him for the handsome doctor), his kids, and his debtors and try to learn how to defeat another army and become king of a tribe. He even buys some gym equipment and start eating special proteins to create some muscle. Up to this moment, there is some kind of déjà vu in the story, but suddenly (after the enemy tribe is defeated), things get an unexpected turn and Remy has to re-think about his new personality. By the end, the movie does not quite follows the American's politically correct rule of moral endings.

The technicall aspects are quite good, including some original and very funny FX.

In brief, a very original comedy; but deeper than you may think.