We are in the year 2023 after Jesus Christ. The entire billboard is occupied by the Americans… All of it? Not! A village populated by irreducible Gauls resists, still and as always, the invader. Although the French defense against the American blockbusters is now poorer than ever, everything is said: the new Asterix and Obelix film never becomes an unmitigated disaster, but it does not fix any of the mistakes made previously and multiplies them. committing the ultimate nonsense: that its two protagonists fall unpleasant to the viewer.
These French are crazy!
All the live-action Asterix movies were based on different albums from Uderzo and Goscinny’s career and thus they had some almost magical humor breakouts among the general mediocrity. But for ‘Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Kingdom’ Guillaume Canet has filmed a totally original story in which the Gauls travel to China, having a great time with the names of the characters, as if they were an old joke.
Dang Sin Kuing, Fo Yong or Wang Tah are some of the Chinese names in the film, which they are far from the flashes of originality of the original comics. It is the tendency of the entire film: to try to surprise people by walking through places untraveled by the saga, but stay halfway through all of them or, directly, fail in their purposes.
The film endeavors to antagonize the two friends, make Asterix vegan or get them into love affairs, with which it achieves the impossible: that let’s not put up with the characters we’ve grown up with and enjoyed for so many decades. The Gauls are devoid of their classic personalities and instead receive that of characters that are not only not funny, but also unpleasant. This becomes especially noticeable in an Asterix written as if it were another spiteful character, eaten away by jealousy and selfishbut also in the rest of the village: except for the characters of a single gag, such as Assurancetúrix or Edadepiédrix, the rest are very poorly represented.
Wow Panoramix
the scriptwriters they have tried to recreate a Uderzo and Goscinny comic without sitting down to think about what made them unique. Thus, they dedicate themselves to repeating the running gags without any kind of cohesion: the pirates, the wild boars, Obelix giving away menhirs… It is as if, in the absence of having original material from which to be inspired, their creators they would have opted directly for laziness and audacity of reducing magnificent comics to poorly executed silly jokes, without any kind of timing or narrative coherence.
And it is not only that: visually it seems that we are more in a cosplay contest than in a movie. We never see the characters come to life, but rather actors wearing suits and mustaches that they are clearly uncomfortable with. It is true that at the time of the fights everything looks good enough (except for certain fatal moments of Asterix acquiring animal parts), but A good job of special effects is useless if the rest of the shots are not taken care of.
You may be reading this and wondering, “Well, okay, I wasn’t expecting a good movie, but at least… Is it funny?” I’m afraid the answer will not surprise you. ‘Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Kingdom’ is nice to watch at its best, but he never gets to have that moment of laughter that he clearly seeks. When it hits at some point, it doesn’t have the desired effect on the viewer because it simply doesn’t empathize with it. some characters that seem more taken from ‘It’s always sunny in Philadelphia’ than from the bande dessinée.
Not! You will not sing!
After two fabulous animated films (‘The Residence of the Gods’ and ‘The Secret of the Magic Potion’), You’d think the French have learned their lesson in bringing comics to the screen.but it is not like that: ten years after ‘Asterix and Obelix at the service of Her Majesty’, which already hit a box office hit, they have decided to return with new faces for the characters and abandoning Gerard Depardieu forever, but Guillaume Canet and Gilles Lellouche, very versatile and with a very interesting career, make a mistake when approaching the characters. They caricature instead of humanizing, appearing distant at all times and, why not say it, a bit ridiculous.
There are two interpreters who get out of this festival of bad decisions: Vincent Cassel as Caesar and the glorified cameo of Marion Cotillard as Cleopatra. Both are compelling, comedic and eat up the screen. Frankly, I wish the film had focused on them instead of having to put up with misguided homages to wuxia movies or inefficient (and absurd) attempts to modernize characters with more than 60 years of history or use references to the size of Caesar’s penis or the incipient veganism of Asterix.
After five movies, it’s time to get real and hang up the mehir and sword: real action doesn’t work for a character as dependent on drawing as Asterix. If we also add the unnecessary audacity of creating a story apart from the originals without having a micron of his talent, the result is a trifle like ‘Asterix and Obelix: the middle kingdom’which shows that this saga has long since run out of magic potion.