Quebec is the only province in Canada, as far as I know, that has an entire film industry contained within the province. While a ‘Canadian’ film can come from Nunavut as much as it can come from Toronto, a ‘Quebecois’ movie can only come from our expansive province chipped from a block of ice. One of our leading directors is Louis Saia, who cut his teeth in sitcoms and is now making bigger, more complex sitcoms for the screen. He is the man behind Les Boys, a somewhat-entertaining hockey film with a gigantic cast. With Les Dangereux, Saia brings his biggest project to date; it just so happens to be the biggest-budgeted Quebec film of all time… at a paltry-looking 7 million dollars!

Roxanne Labelle (the extremely annoying Véronique Cloutier) is a very popular pop singer who is kidnapped by a pyromaniac two-bit gangster with a bad leg (and that’s pretty much all you ever find out about him) named Boiteuse (Guy Nadon) and his star struck girlfriend (Dominique Quesnel). Her manager/father (Marc Messier) sends a young accountant named Francis (stand-up comedian Stéphane Rousseau) to deliver the ransom money. Thrown in this big mess is Francis’ suicidal brother Marco (Michel Charette), the Chinese Mafia, an animal-loving hitman (Pierre Lebeau) and his Tiger Woods-obsessed partner (Didier Lucien), Boiteuse’s drug-addled nephew (Miro) and even more useless stock characters that serve only to make the plot even more contrived.

It’s obvious that Saia intended this to be a send-up of Pulp Fiction and other similar movies. Everything’s there: the expansive cast (composed mostly of very talented actors… that you’ve never heard of), the black humor, the violence (I’ll get to that later)… hell, the characters of Dirty Henri and Tiger are obviously a (poor) parody of Travolta and Jackson from Pulp Fiction. The film, however, is a gigantic mess. There’s too much going on here, there are too many characters, there’s too much plot… yet the movie isn’t even two hours long.

The script is also problematic. The humor is mostly deja vu; at one point, Rousseau asks an overweight woman when her baby is due. Talk about originality! Another gag concerns a gay scientist who’s on the verge of discovering the cure to cancer… only to be killed by Tiger. Ho ho ho. The presence of such juvenile humor all the more disappointing considering the ample talents of the cast; Rousseau is a gifted stand-up comedian who’s great at impressions and the like. Here, his talents are reduced to bumbling around and falling on his face. The dialogue shines on occasion, but it’s probably just a case of talented comedians elevating the material.

There was never much violence in Saia’s previous projects because the settings never called for it. That’s a good thing, because the violence here is so poorly handled it’s led me to believe that Saia has no idea what black humor is. Take for example the scene where Lucky Foo, the Chinese triad leader, walks into a restaurant and burns a waiter’s head in hot oil. He screams bloody murder, Foo laughs… and apparently, we’re supposed to laugh. Later we see the waiter again, grossly disfigured… and then are supposed to laugh again as Foo impales him graphically with chopsticks. I’m no prude; hell, I encourage black comedy. Here, it’s not ridiculous enough to be funny and not low-key enough to be the shocking kind of black comedy. It’s the equivalent of a schoolyard bully beating up a small kid to impress his friends when he’s completely alone.

The characters (all twenty million of them) are one-dimensional at best; they’re given a single personality trait and the movie constantly re-uses the same jokes over and over again. Saia has done a parody while completely oblivious to what made the movies he parodied so special. It’s a film so fundamentally flawed that it becomes almost absurdly enjoyable in a train wreck sort of way.

If the film has a saving grace, it’s in the cast. Rousseau, despite not being very well used, makes a passable leading man. The best thing I can say about him is that he could have been worse. Cloutier (an ex-VJ who just so happens to be the daughter of Guy Cloutier, a Ted Turner-like media mogul) is horrible; not only are we subjected to TWO concert scenes that comprise of her wailing like a banshee and prancing around while the logos of Labatt beer and Subway restaurants are prominently featured, we also have to face the fact that she eventually becomes more than just a supporting character and turns into the female lead. I don’t smell many more movie offers in her future, thankfully. Marc Messier, another of our biggest names, is stuck with the thankless role of the manager, who serves mostly as the guy who shows up between scenes to swear a lot and make the movie feel more urgent.

Pierre Lebeau, who is Quebec’s answer to Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro, takes a supporting role in this one. This one of my favorite things about Quebec cinema: since we have a relatively limited number of productions coming out every year, many of our actors are willing to take smaller roles. Lebeau is one of those actors; he was the lead in Sérpahin (a hugely successful film, the biggest grossing Quebec film ever) yet he still finds the time to take relatively smaller roles in movies like this. Lebeau gives the film some of its best moments, delivering one-liners like he was born to do this. Didier Lucien is also funny as Tiger, but his character so narrow and one-dimensional that he overstays his welcome. Nadon and Quesnel, as the hostage-taking couple, are terribly annoying, but the two jewels in this cast’s crown are Michel Charette as the suicidal, mulletheaded Marco and newcomer Miro as the terminally dumb Bing. Both give the movie a much-needed jolt whenever they’re on-screen.

In the long run, Les Dangereux resembles our national dish, poutine. Poutine is composed of French fries, cheese and gravy. It’s hardly a gastronomic wonder; it’s served in all the dingy run-down greasy spoons, but we like it, despite the fact that it’s pretty gross on paper. This movie is like that: if you break it down, it’s a pretty terrible movie… but there’s something about it that makes us like it. Like poutine, it’s very typical of its origins… and maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all. I can’t really say that I liked this movie; a lot of it is beyond terrible. I can’t really hate it, either, because for all its faults, it’s got a certain odd charm.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day