TheRetroCritic

Tom Hanks stars in this 1985 comedy about a random guy who is used as a pawn by the CIA in the middle of some tit-for-that infighting. A remake of French spy farce  The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe starring Pierre Richard, this was yet another Hollywood attempt at adapting one of Francis Veber's most popular films. The general plot is the same as in the original except Tom Hanks' character isn't quite as clumsy or as much fun as Pierre Richard's François Perrin. There's no consistency in terms of the slapstick because Richard (Hanks) is portrayed as being just a normal guy whereas in the original, that character was very much an Inspector Clouseau-esque idiot. We know Tom Hanks can do slapstick really well from the likes of The Burbs or The Money Pit so it must have been a conscious decision to dumb down that character, which simply doesn't work since that's replaced with no real personality traits. The plot is also told with little style or en

Shortly before Gene Wilder turned a French film into The Woman In Red , we got The Toy , a remake of Francis Veber's Le Jouet starring Richard Pryor in the role originally played by Pierre Richard. It did well at the box-office despite critics not exactly praising it. One of the many Francis Veber comedies to be adapted into Hollywood films, The Toy should have been a breeze with its simple concept leaving little room for messing up and the reliable Pryor doing his thing. For the most part, this remake is pretty faithful to the original film as a rich, spoiled kid (played by Scott Schwartz) basically buys a grown man as a toy just to annoy his distant father only to find that a friendship develops between he and his purchase. The key scenes from the French film are recreated here from Pierre Richard's slapstick shenanigans to the kid's creation of a newspaper exposing his father's cold approach to everyone. As hard as he tries to make the film fun, Richard Pryor f

Slapstick maestro Pierre Richard teams up with Gerard Depardieu in La Chevre (aka The Goat), a French comedy about a man plagued by relentless bad luck who is hired to find a missing person who is just as unlucky as he is. Campana (Depardieu) is the professional detective who is unfortunate enough to be tasked with assisting Francois Perrin (Richard) with his mission, the latter not realising that the only reason he's leading the investigation is because the father of the lost young woman is hoping his inherent bad luck will lead him to his daughter somehow. The adventure takes the unlikely duo to Mexico and, along the way, they encounter gangsters, prostitutes, dirty cops, gorillas, bees and countless other problems. Eventually, the initially sceptical Campana starts to realise that Perrin might just be as jinxed as his boss claimed he was. Pierre Richard and Gerard Depardieu teamed up in two other Francis Veber films, Les Comperes and Les Fugitifs , which were both remad