Fumar causa tos

Collecting some vaguely creative ideas and putting them in a movie without any real work cannot make a good result. Some projects may lack some budget and compensate with creativity. Here, we get the exact opposite, with a huge cast trapped into a non-existing direction. You'll always find some people to find it's genius or whatever. These people are only trying to look cool.

The movie is excessively short and boring at the same time. The stories composing the film are all shallow and its "modern" messages are not subtle at all. Either people won't get them or people will find them simplistic.

If Quentin Dupieux started working a little bit harder, maybe the result would deserve some interest and show some respect to the audience. Here, we are served something without any care or teste. The movie is emotionless. Because it seems inspired by Peter Jackson's early works and the Metal Heroes era, it should at least have their spirit and energy...

Five vigilantes dressed in blue who can invoke, death, destruction from the compounds in their smoke, Mercury and Nicotine, Ammonia, Methanol - Benzene, plus a rat who dribbles green, you wouldn't stroke (unless you were an attractive young lady with a fetish for vermin, they do exist apparently!). Sent away to come together and prepare, revealing stories leaving eyebrows in the air, hats that change wearers perception, machinery of misconception, defective robots lead to anguish, gloom, despair. Then Lézardin decides to stub earth's light, extinguishing a planet with his clout, can Tobacco Force exhale, create a cancer to avail, getting hooked into a cycle, with no way out.

Stars an odd group of fantastic vigilantes called the "tobacco-forces", the five super heroes are nicotine, benzène (benzene), méthanol (methanol), ammoniaque (ammonia), and mercure (mercury), their names are all chemical components found inside cigarettes and now they're falling apart. To rebuild team spirit, their leader, Benzène: Gilles Lellouche, suggests that they meet for a week-long retreat, before returning to save the world.

Cinema Indie's 'Enfant Terrible', Quentin Dupieux (Yannick, Mandibules), directs this surreal, sloppy fantasy comedy full of stories as extravagant and bizarre as the film's premise. After annihilating a dangerous giant torture facing off against them, the ungainly tobacco patrol formed by a motley team uses the negative energies of tobacco to drown their enemies until they die, they receive the order to begin a retreat that strengthens the cohesion of the group and allows them to defeat Lizard, a villain who intends to destroy the earth before the year ends. From there, the tacky story of the retreat joins the stories of the eccentric protagonists in a spiral of dark humor, full of puddles, unpredictable characters, incongruous events, ramshackle gore and lousy special effects. The cast is largely unknown to the general public, except for Gilles Lellouche, Vincent Lacoste, Adèle Exarchopoulos as Céline and voice by Alain Chabat as Chief Didier.

Mediocre and somewhat blurry photography mainly in the South of France: the opening scene was shot in the quarry Cabrières d'Avignon, Vaucluse; the lake in Lac de Peïroou, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône; the sawmill in Les Mages, Gard; Uzès and studios of Provence, Martigues, Bouches-du-Rhône, Francia.

This absurd motion picture was mediocrely directed by Quentin Dupieux and it premiered at the midnight section of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Being second film directed by Quentin Dupieux released in 2022, after Incredible But True (2022). Quentin has made some bizarre, offbeat films, getting some french hits. He has directed: Le Daim or Deerskin (United States, English title) (2010), Au poste (2018), Mandibules (2020), Yannick (2023), and its most succesful film was Rubber (2010). Rating: 4.5/10. Only advisable for fans of strange and surreal films.

Welcome to the wonderful and bizar world of writer and director Quentin Dupieux. I have been walking on this very place called earth for many decades now and I must confess I have never ever before met any director as uniquely weird (and unnervingly funny) as director Quentin Dupieux.

I have seen ALL of his movies and this is one of his less weird scripts, but BEWARE, less weird in Quentin Dupieux' world means it is still the craziest, most unnerving and thoughtprovoking story you will have ever witnessed. I am dead serious!

It's at first an unassuming simple and playful story about some action heroes. Then it turns into a macabre (yet still hilariously funny) story about a woman who finds a helmet and suddenly becomes a serial killer. And it ends on a "lighter note" about the destruction of the entire planet depending on some galactic recipe for soup.

Forget about the story though. Forget about trying to make sense of it all. Fish can speak. Dismembered body parts can still smoke. And making love to a acid vomiting puppet is sexy. It doesnt make sense, but it doesnt need to. It's a Quentin Dupieux world on it's own. It's almost as wonderful as dreaming...and having a good laugh while at it...

Yes, welcome to the extraordinary world of director and writer Quentin Dupieux.

Highly recommended. Such a shame Dupieux' work isnt released on a much wider scale. So many folks, from so many countries would be delighted to see this French director/writer genius at work!

Thank you for reading my 2000 th review on Imdb!

Quentin Dupieux never seems to make a conventional movie, and for that, I love him. The bizarre imageries of his imagination makes me curiously wonder what his daily thought process is. For Cigarettes Causes Coughing, it's yet another subversive trek that will leave you confused and wanting more explanation.

The American advertising made this look like a weird take on Marvel movies, but as usual, it morphed into something else entirely. We have a superhero group that is in malaise, breaking due to other conditions of the typical human experience. Jealousy, selfishness, family obligations and so forth are making them ineffective in the field. So what is needed? A group retreat.

But we don't see any real hashing out of emotions or team building per se, it's mostly just existential dread and stories about the inevitability of death. It's always a tough sledding to figure out what Dupieux is trying to convey, simply because his version of reality is rarely coherent. Amidst the washed out color of the worlds he creates, he leaves all meaning for the viewer to decide. What would happen if Nick Fury was in the middle of a love triangle with Black Widow and Captain Marvel? It's one of those weird scenarios that I am sure Dupieux thinks of while sipping his cognac.

The trick to watching these types of meaning is to understand there might not be one, or it might require some reading to figure it out. On the other hand, they sure are strange and entertaining anti-film.