Les bronzés 3: amis pour la vie

I'm surprised by the low ratings Les Bronzés 3: Amis Pour La Vie (French Fried Vacation: Friends Forever for the English title, yes I still think it's a stupid translation) gets. I agree it's the lesser good of the three in this trilogy but it's still worth watching, certainly if you were a fan of Les Bronzés and Les Bronzés Font du Ski, the classics from 45 years ago. The second movie was definitely the best but this lesser popular one is made so much later, it was great to see the crew of Le Splendid again. Friends forever is a good title for it as this team of top class actors made so many good movies together. I know it will never get the same status as the first two movies got, they are absolute classics of the French comedy, but it deserves a higher rating.

oh god this is a bad movie. there are only 2 good laughs, and they're cheap.

that's to few for a comedy. i was expecting a lot from Les Bronzés 3, since the members of the splendid are the best comedy writers and actors in France for the last 30 years.

nowadays, their time has gone.

The funny characters (Jean Claude dusse) are not funny anymore. The loser has become a semi loser/semi winner and he's to aware of his own attitude to be funny. he's a spectator like us, not an actor.

too bad.

Thierry Lhermitte has problems with his wife, as always. but this time it is not funny, it's dramatic. what the hell are they trying to do? a romantic comedy? a drama? 0/10

I'm a huge fan of Le Splendid, I have seen Les Bronzés, Les Bronzés font du ski and Le Père Noël a million times and I know most of the dialogues by heart. Every time I look at those movies I still laugh.

On the other hand, this one is really THE PITS!!. The jokes are not even funny and ultra-conventional, or just gross. Christian Clavier is the worst, and worse than ever here. Now I really hate him. There are no original punch lines at all, and when they try to reference the prequels, this is a disaster. It looks like a mix between "La soif de l'or" and "Les Charlots font l'Espagne". If you are a great fan of "Le Splendid", watching this movie will make you sorry for them. If you don't like "The Splendid", that's definitely the movie that will make you hate them even more. If you can borrow the DVD, don't do it. Avoid at all costs.

I have no idea why people bash this movie so harshly. It is of course different from the first two films because it's set 27 years later and naturally things have changed.

I think it's necessary to clear the air a bit on the problems people have with this movie: First off, people complained that at the time of the first two movies, all the actors were unknowns, now that they are all famous, people don't like it anymore. I think it was a good idea to bring all the original actors together and of course it's great to see the same characters again.

The second complaint was that this film isn't funny. I, for one, did not find the original Bronzés film to be funny at all. There was no story line, no interesting sub plots and uninteresting and despicable characters. The sexist and racist portrayals (at the time) looked like something taken out of The Deer Hunter and played out for a comedy.

The second one, however, is totally different. The group go skiing, and like in the first one, it involves tourist activities led by Popeye. In this film, everything is vastly improved and the main characters are more developed. Jérome settles for Gigi, while the rest stay in the same situations. During the second half, they get lost in the snowy wilderness. In the scene where they drink the infamous "liqueur d'échalottes", I almost cracked a rib from laughing so hard.

Les Bronzés 3 is a combination of the two: The same setting as the first and the quality humor of the second. Another good thing is that the cinematography is beautiful and the subplot involving the "beast" is brilliant.

It's a sequel, not as good as the previous one, but good all the same. Don't be put off by all the bad reviews people have given it, because it really isn't that bad.

The idea of reuniting these infamous fellows was not necessarily a good one. Sure, they made us laugh a good deal 25 years ago with their precise and exquisite sense of humor. Sure, their portrayal of the bigger segment of French society was dead-on. Of course, their bad manners and mean-spirited friendships contributed to propel them to stardom. But the very reasons why we enjoyed watching their mediocrity was that they weren't stars. They were a quasi-unknown bunch on the margin of French culture. They were successful because they distanced themselves from both bourgeois mentality and the counter-culture allowing for their insolent brains to come up with such familiar characters. That was last century. And between the late seventies and 2006, they've grown to be the very establishment of mainstream French comedy, something that hardly makes for good, right-on insolence.

So the movie feels at times nostalgic but always superficial. As if the actors had become the characters and in the process had lost the necessary distance to make us laugh.