Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom (2023)

The fifth live-action outing for the indomitable Gauls arrives with a budget of seventy-two million dollars and the weary dignity of a franchise that has stopped pretending it knows what it is doing. Guillaume Canet directs and stars, replacing Gérard Depardieu's Obelix with Gilles Lellouche, and relocates the whole affair to Han-era China. The Chinese roles are filled by Asian performers, Julie Chen, Leanna Chea, Linh-Dan Pham, Tran Vu Tran and Manu Payet among them, which is the sensible choice for a story set in a Chinese court and carries no detectable ideological freight. The film needed faces for that court. Casting directors, for once, cast accordingly.

Where progressive sensibilities do surface, they arrive quietly and without ceremony. Tat Han, a bodyguard played by Leanna Chea, declines Asterix's help against the pirates, handles the fight alone, and sinks their ship. The Empress, presumed a hostage, turns out to be assembling an army and rides onto the battlefield with the whole of China behind her. Princess Fu Yi spends the running time pursuing her own rescue and her own romance instead of waiting to be won. These are modest empowerment beats, folded into slapstick, and the film never stops to admire them. Nobody delivers a speech about it. The camera simply moves on to the next pratfall.

The rest of the cultural checklist goes largely untouched. There is no romance beyond the heterosexual pairings, no environmental sermon, no class critique behind the villain's tax levy, and no reframing of history beyond the usual comic anachronism of mixing 50 BC Gaul with Caesar, Cleopatra and the Han dynasty. Obelix's bulk remains a running gag about boars and menhirs, not a statement about bodies. And the film lectures no one. Its moral instruction is limited to the observation that hitting Romans is fun. The result is a loud, expensive, critically unloved family comedy that mostly wants to be left alone. We can respect that.