OSS 117: Lost in Rio (2009)

Michel Hazanavicius returns to the Eurospy sandbox with a sequel that strands Jean Dujardin's Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath in 1967 Rio de Janeiro, hunting a microfilm and a fugitive Nazi. The machinery is immaculate: rear projection, split screens lifted from The Thomas Crown Affair, Dean Martin on the soundtrack. The film knows exactly which 1960s spy pictures it is borrowing from, and it borrows with affection. Dujardin plays a man of bottomless confidence and negligible self-awareness, which remains the central joke.

That joke carries the film's social content, and the content is mostly aimed at its own hero. Louise Monot's Colonel Dolorès Koulechov, an Israeli officer working the Eichmann playbook, spends the running time correcting his colonial assumptions about Brazil, his casual misogyny, and his cheerful faith in French institutions. The corrections land as banter, not as instruction. When she lists the features of a dictatorship and he answers that he calls that France, the film is having its cake and eating it. The racism and sexism on display are targets, which means they are also the material, and the audience is invited to laugh at the gap between the man and the era.

Beyond that, the cupboard is bare. There is no environmental concern, no argument about capital, no interest in body image or mental health, no queer subtext worth the name. The historical furniture of escaped Nazis in South America serves as period texture, not as reinterpretation. A few supporting players of Middle Eastern and Asian descent appear, and the film does not pause to congratulate itself. This is a well-made pastiche with a sour streak, and it earns its laughs the old way: by letting a fool talk.