Brice 3 (2016)

Brice 3 arrives eleven years after Brice de Nice, which is a long time to wait for a man to say "casse" again. Jean Dujardin returns as the sun-bleached surfer who never learned to surf, summoned by his friend Marius to cross the globe on some errand of loyalty. The world around him has moved on. He has not. James Huth directs with the steady hand of a man who knows exactly what his audience came for, and it is not introspection.

There is something almost restful about a film this uninterested in the conversation of its moment. The cast is white, French, and comfortable, drawn from the same comedic stock as the original. No subplot pauses to instruct us on gender, race, money, or the warming of the oceans. The humor is physical, tribal, and occasionally cruel in the manner of all slapstick, which is to say it mocks the body instead of celebrating it. Nobody here is on a journey of self-acceptance. Nobody is neurodivergent in any sense a streaming service would recognize. History is not reinterpreted, because history does not come up.

So we have a sequel that opened at number one in France on the strength of nostalgia and a catchphrase, asking nothing of anyone. That is not a failure of conscience. It is a comedy with no message to deliver, no sermon to preach, no audience to correct. We could call it shallow. In this climate, it reads as almost quaint, a relic from before every joke required a disclaimer.