I was really excited to watch this. Gad Elmaleh is quiet possibly my favorite stand-up comedian. He's unfortunately not that well (quasi not known at all) outside France, or maybe other French-speaking countries, and I would not like at all this film to introduce him to other countries, since this is an extremely mediocre work from one of the funniest people alive.
Gad Elmaleh writes, directs and acts, and I thought oh well...that's brilliant! That never happened, he only did acting before, and now he'll have the whole film under control, and this is going to be great! I was immensely disappointed.
This is, unfortunately, the kind of comedy where it's enough to watch the trailer, because there is nothing more really in the film. I nearly turned the film off after half an hour, since I only smiled a few times, and hey, there is a bit of comedy in every film nowadays, even horror films.... so that means I wouldn't have realized that it was a comedy if I didn't know about it beforehand. Fortunately after the first 30 minutes the film gets better. There will be a few 'gentle' laughs, but nothing compared to to his stand-up acts where I was crying from laughter. Interestingly enough enough there is a part where he uses one of his funniest and most famous sentence from one of his stand-up shows...and it just doesn't work, which shows that the whole thing is far from that very best Gad Elmaleh can do.
Secondly, maybe less important, but extremely annoying is the terrible editing. It's the problem throughout the whole film: in one shot the hand is up, in the next one it's down. Sometimes they could even change their hair style in the split second. I believe the reason for this is a rushed post-production, but anyways it's there, it can be noticed and it's extremely annoying.
The truth is that the film doesn't know what it wants to be: at the same time it's a drama about family, friendship, success and a comedy. The problem is that the dramatic part, although pretty decent considering that this is Elmaleh's first film, is still unoriginal with no particular surprises. As for the comedy part, just read again the third paragraph. So what is there left? A film that is just flat, with too many uninteresting parts. The only thing that kept me watching was Elmaleh himself, and only because in every scene of his I said to myself: "I know this guy. He's usually extremely funny. I'll wait, there sure will be hilarious moments". And I waited for 90 minutes and nothing happened. Elmaleh is very very far from his best, and if you do not know who he is, then I don't think you should even start considering watching this film.
