Serial Teachers 2 (2015)

The worst teachers in France are dispatched to the finest school in England, where they will presumably ruin it. Such is the premise of Serial Teachers 2, a 2015 French comedy directed by Pierre-François Martin-Laval, who also appears as the hapless Polochon. It follows the 2013 original without apology and without ambition beyond the next pratfall. Kev Adams returns as Boulard, the King of the Dunces, and the film asks him to be struck by circumstance for ninety minutes. The franchise knows its audience. It has no interest in finding another one.

An audit of the picture's progressive content returns a clean sheet. The cast includes performers of North African and Caribbean background, among them Stéfi Celma and Firmine Richard, yet the film never frames them as representation, nor does it comment on the fact of their presence. They are simply there, doing jokes. No romantic subplot bends toward anything but heterosexual farce. No female character is handed a thesis about her own condition. The classroom is a machine for humiliation, not for lessons about equity. There is no climate anxiety, no rage at the wealthy, no celebration of the body as it is, no neurodivergent awakening, no revision of the historical record. The film is about a school. It stays about a school.

Lecture energy is absent because the film has nothing to teach. It wants laughter, preferably loud, preferably from a wide room. That is an honest goal, and the picture pursues it with a shrug. What remains is a broad comedy of national stereotypes, French sloth against English discipline, executed with a workman's indifference. There is no sermon here. There is barely a plot. The classification is straightforward, and the ledger is empty.