Asterix at the Olympic Games (2008)

Asterix at the Olympic Games arrived in 2008 with the weight of a national treasury behind it, the most expensive French production of its moment, and the third entry in a live-action series that had already established Depardieu's Obelix as an institution. The plot is a straightforward errand: two Gauls travel to Greece to win laurels so that a young friend may marry a princess. Brutus schemes against his father. Alain Delon, in his final screen performance, lends the proceedings a certain marble dignity that the script does not deserve.

The cultural inventory here is barren, and the barrenness is a matter of genre, not of failure. The casting is a uniformly European affair, French and Italian and Spanish names filling a roster that no one assembled with an eye toward anything but box office. Princess Irina exists as a prize, a wedding at the end of the race, and the film never pretends otherwise. Obelix's bulk is a punchline, hauled out whenever a scene needs a laugh, and no one involved appears to have considered that a message might be extracted from it. The parade of sports celebrities (Schumacher, Zidane, Parker, Mauresmo) is spectacle, not statement.

What the film offers instead is slapstick, wild boar, and a magic potion. It lectures no one. There is no thesis to deliver, no lesson appended to the final reel, no moral instruction smuggled into the closing ceremony. In an era that increasingly treats comedy as a delivery mechanism for instruction, this one simply wants to show a large man punching a Roman. There is something almost restful in that. The film was not good, and its critics said so at length. But it was, by the standards of its own ambitions, complete. A relic from an age when a French farce could cost a fortune and ask nothing of the viewer but laughter.