good back-story, and good acting

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Some movie get old well, other don't: this one is rather among the latter: I can't say it's bad but it is not as much fun as I thought it was. I watched it as a kid for sure but I can't remember if it was on screen or at TV. There is some funny moments and for sure this duo always works great and is among the best in french cinema but here the story is a bit far fetched: to find a goofy and unlucky woman in south America, the solution is to send a goofy and unlucky investigator… Well, like Gerard, I'm not really convinced and it's above all very repetitive and totally predictable… The Mexican locations adds a bit exoticism but at the end, it's not in my classics….

This was only Veber's second film as a double-threat (writer-director) and the first to employ the inspired casting of Gerard Depardieu and Pierre Richard. Its recent re-release on DVD to celebrate its 20th anniversary should make it accessible to a whole new generation too young to have caught it first time around. One only has to read the comments - almost exclusively raves - to guage the quality and I can only add one more voice, slightly hoarse from so much laughter in support. The concept is simplicity itself; take one accident-prone girl and because her father is an industrialist, ergo wealthy, let her predilection for bad luck result in her playing into the hands of kidnappers THEN, instead of hiring a team of SAS/mercenaries to track her down hire just One private investigator and supply him with a human bloodhound in the form of as big a dork as the missing girl. Pierre Richard breathes life into a dork who doesn't wait for a banana skin to trip on, he brings his own. Team him up with a pragmatic Gerard Depardieu who refuses to give house room to the concept of bad luck and just stand back and let them get on with it. The Mexican setting is largely irrelevant, it could just as well have been set in Marseilles but laffs are laffs wherever they occur. The ending is particularly effective - it's always something of a problem to end a story like this - as the two Dorks fall in love as expected but then Veber rounds it off with one last neat and very apposite visual gag. Not to be missed. 10/10

If you want to see what comedy should be, instead of the gross-out humor passed off as comedy in movies like Austin Powers, see this film. This forgotten gem stars a very young Gérard Depardieu as adetective hired to find the missing daughter of a business. It is shot in the French tradition of visual comedy, and is very, very funny.POSSIBLE SPOILERS:Gérard's character, a no-nonsense detective who does not believe in superstitions or "luck", has been teamed with a hapless man whose life seems to disprove the notion that bad luck does not exist. The missing girl also has had a life of extraordinary mishaps, and her father believes that this poor schmuck will be like a guide dog leading Depardieu straight to her. Depardieu's mission becomes more and more simply trying to keep this poor shmoe alive as he searches for the businessman's daughter, and continues to disbelieve his claims of bad luck; until it starts to rub off on him. By the end of the film, he is a superstitious nervous wreck, and it is fun to see this handsome leading man developing a nervous tic and believing the smallest occurrences are "a sign" that something bad is about to happen. A long stream of unpredictable and inventive incidents occur throughout the movie that would convince anyone that carrying a lucky charm is not such a bad idea after all. The end is a masterpiece of French visual humor. If you like Depardieu, check this out sometime. There are worse ways (and movies) to spend your evening. By the way, Martin Short and Danny Glover remade this movie a few years ago, and it was not a tenth as funny as the original; proving that American screenwriters need to smarten up their writing. Seven stars for me.

This is THE masterpiece of funniness. Trust me, the big winner trio (Depardieu, Richard and Veber) shows one more time his talent. On one hand Pignon/Richard is the unluckiest man on earth, all the things you don't even think about happen to him and on the other one there is Depardieu, a cartesian private detective who doesn't believe in fate or luck, he disagrees with these concepts. Actually, by meeting Pignon, his entire life will be turned up side down because they must work together to find Pignon's Headmaster's daughter who was kidnapped in Venezuela. The worse thing will happen to the Laurel-and-Hardy-like team. You almost die of laughing so much. This is the comedy one should have seen once, just as "the Gods must be crazy." The movie is really worth being watched.