Boule & Bill 2

"Boule Et Bill " is a charming comic strip ,created by Roba in 1959;it mainly revolves around the family home ,Boule, his parents ,mom,who's the perfect housewife and papa,who works in an advertising agency,his dog Bill ,and his tortoise Caroline; recurrent characters include his good pal Pouf (who cannot see cause a tuft of hair hides his eyes),and cat Caporal.Their adventures consist of one page gags ,which make them hard to transfer to the screen ;I have not seen the first effort ,but "2" is a complete fiasco.

It begins with a spate of dirty words and includes crude scenes :there was never,in a month of Sundays , vulgarity in Roba's often witty mini-stories.

1°) The adults :it's a disaster .Frank Dubosc as daddy ,overplays and is totally unbearable ;the actress playing his boss is worse, it looks like they had Cruella in mind (and they borrow a lot from "101 dalmatians " ,in the scenes in the park); Mathilde Seigner and the school teacher manage to save something from the wreckage ,but all that concerns the grown-ups was written by morons :I wonder if they had ever read one album!

2)The animals : dog Bill can communicate (mainly with his ears ) with his family ,and there is no problem with his fellow animals in the comics ;in the movie ,they use voices over to make them talk (probably borrowed from the "101 dalmatians " ,the (mediocre) movie ,not the excellent cartoon );they even desperately try to integrate tortoise Caroline into the plot !

3 ) The children :the subplot concerning them is certainly less bad than the rest; the newcomer ,Wilfrid (probably inspired by Roba's Gérard ) ,is a snob pretentious little brat whose dad is a brave cop who made the headlines in the newspapers ,and who makes Boule jealous by stealing his sweetheart Charlotte .There's even a good scene when the shoolteacher wants to take her pupils to visit Gerard's house to see dad's collection of weapons (insightful critic by Boule) ;too bad they did not develop this side of the story for Wilfrid has a dark side to him ;un fortunately it degenerates into a sidecar race and a an improbable scene with a hand grenade .

We are two thousand light years from Roba's comics !

For a movie aimed at the children's market ,we can wonder why,one more time ,the songs are in English : Bobby Vinton's "Mister Lonely " was covered by Johnny Hallyday as "Quand Revient La Nuit " all the same !and the lyrics are similar.