Best movie of this year hands down!

Simply Perfect

Brilliant and touching

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Most of the by now many Astérix adaptions are based on the comic albums, this film has its own script - maybe that's why it works better than the other ones. The story is much more fantastic and postmodern than usual and most of the gags center more on sight than on wordplay - which is a good thing for a movie. The comics are full of clever wit but that's hard to translate on screen. There's also much satire here; I especially liked the bureaucratic hellhouse. Some of the 12 labours are obviously better than others but that's OK too, the story is episodic enough anyway. The animation is just OK, a far cry from Disney or Miyazaki standards, but basically it does its job.

When the Roman soldiers are defeated yet again, a rumour starts that the Gauls must be gods of some sort. Eager to find out the truth, Cesar challenges them to complete 12 tasks just as Hercules once did. If they pass all 12 then he will concede they must be gods and will leave them in peace. Asterix and Obelix are selected to complete the tasks and set out with a Roman administrator to record the tasks.Although some of the little tasks in this bitty film are imaginative and funny (the admin one for example), the majority of this film is deeply flawed. The first few tasks are rubbish but some of them get better as they go. The administration one starts out very imaginative but gets silly in the style of the rest of the film. The humour here is not the witty stuff of the books but noisy childish stuff that I simply didn't find very funny. The fragmented nature of the plot should have made it easy to have some tasks be slapstick and others be very smart, but instead it goes for an unfunny sort of jaunty humour that doesn't work.The actors hurt the film more than I could have imagined. I relate this to the English version of the film, perhaps the other languages had better actors more suited to the roles, but the English one is awful - I though Craig Charles was not a good Asterix until I saw this film! All the voices are very whiney and nasal and simply do not suit any of the characters - Asterix and Obelix in particular are just plain wrong and that little admin may have been amusing for about two seconds but after a while his voice simply grates. The boring and poorly cast voices serve to make the film feel deadly dull and humourless; they really sucked the life out of it.Overall this film has a few moments but generally it is poor. The animation and music are far to round, colourful, cheerful and lacking any precision or wit. The humour is far to basic to bear the name Asterix and all in all this is a fairly painful film for all but young kids and Asterix fans who have the patience and grace of a saint.

The best of the several movie adventures of Asterix, Obelix, Vitalstatistix and Co., our heroes are given a series of increasingly difficult tasks by Caesar, with the future of the village at stake - ranging from crossing a ravine by an invisible bridge ("Which you do not see over there") through avoiding the lures of the sirens, combating a champion javelin thrower and getting a permit for the next task (something that will strike a chord in anyone who's ever had to face red tape) to facing a celestial challenge by a god who asks them to... actually, that last one is so funny you have to see it for yourself.There is a book out, but it's the adaptation of the movie, making "The Twelve Tasks Of Asterix" the only one to date actually written for the screen first. Perhaps the makers of the later animated movies and the live-action ones could take the hint? (Or is adapting them properly beyond 'em?) Sheer pleasure throughout, with moments that still make me laugh years after seeing it and some surprisingly strong satire, all the movies should have been like this. Right, let's tie up the bard and bring on the boar...

I'm mostly a rather introvert person. When a comedy makes me smile it has succeeded, when it makes me chuckle it is a rousing success. The climax of this film made me fall from my cinema seat laughing.This film is not based on any of the Asterix comic books as most of the Asterix films. Asterix faces 12 tasks, one more daunting than the other (I can't remember why, it was over 20 years ago), building up to the last one, the most difficult of the lot. Do not, under any circumstances, including hurricanes and invading Mongolic hordes, leave the cinema before that scene!