Just Visiting

Lacking serious competition, Just Visiting might easily be the most cheerfully brain-dead movie Hollywood has churned out in several years, and this would include the output of Adam Sandler and the Farrelly brothers.

A sub-lowbrow remake of Les Visiteurs, a worthless 1993 scatological/time-travel comedy which became one of France’s biggest box-office hits of all time, it re-unites the director and stars (Jean Reno is the only one approaching mass recognition) while shifting the action to modern-day Chicago.

The plot pitches Reno and his sidekick Clavier as, respectively, a noble medieval French count and his filthy unwashed servant, best described in a recent review as ‘a sort of Gallic Blackadder and Baldrick’, though minus the comic effectiveness.

The pair are teleported 800 years into the future by Malcolm MacDowell, shamelessly hamming it up as a wizard – whereupon they proceed to wreak all manner of not-quite-hilarious havoc in the Crocodile Dundee innocents-abroad tradition. It’s conceivable that, as with Dundee, there’s some potential comic mirth here for especially regressive under-tens, what with the relentless avalanche of toilet-related gags.

None of this makes it any less excruciating to sit through. Occasionally attaining a level of awfulness which perversely invites you to pity the thing, Just Visiting could hardly be accused of artistic over-ambition. Mandatory for MENSA snobs.