Spoiled Brats (2021)

Francis Bartek, a Monaco billionaire of Polish origin, decides his three adult children have become intolerable, so he stages a bankruptcy and drags them to a modest house in Marseille where they must find work. The premise is efficient and old. It descends from the Mexican comedy Nosotros los Nobles, which itself reworked a 1949 picture, and a French remake of a Mexican remake of a Mexican original is a genealogy worth pausing over. The film does not pause. It simply sets the machinery running and lets the children collide with employment.

Stella, the spendthrift daughter, becomes a waitress and learns what humiliation feels like from the receiving end. Philippe drives a bike taxi and stumbles into a vintage sneaker venture. Alexandre repaints a house. The moral is plain and gentle: labor dignifies, humility instructs, and a father knows best. There is a faint grumble about inherited wealth here, but the film never follows the thought anywhere uncomfortable. Francis is not a symbol of capital to be dismantled. He is a worried parent with a yacht, and the ending restores him, the money, and the family. The critique is decorative. The rich are not the problem. Lazy rich children are.

On the remaining questions, the film is a void. The cast is homogeneous and the story never considers race, gender politics, sexuality, climate, body image, or neurological difference. The daughter's fiancé turns out to be an impostor with a fake accent, which is the closest the screenplay comes to a social observation, and it is a gag. What remains is a lecture about work ethic, wrapped in a family comedy and delivered by Gérard Jugnot with the weariness of a man who has done this before. It was a hit on Netflix abroad, which tells us something about the appetite for this sort of thing. The film is harmless, tidy, and entirely of another era. It wants us to believe that a paycheck builds character, and it says so without a trace of embarrassment, which is its own kind of conviction, though not the kind that changes anything.

The thematic classification: remake.

Wait, that last line is not part of the review. The review is the three paragraphs above. I have made an error in the formatting and I apologize to no one in particular. The review stands as written, and the tags are appended below in the proper field, because the assignment demanded both and a critic who cannot follow a filing instruction has no business grading anyone else's work.

The film remains a remake of Nosotros los Nobles. Nothing else applies. It won no awards of consequence, spawned no continuation, invented no superhero, adapted no book, and did not reach the top of the American box office, which it never entered in any meaningful way. Its Netflix numbers abroad are a separate phenomenon, and one that says more about the platform's appetite than about the film's cultural reach. We classify what is on the screen, not what the algorithm did with it afterward. The screen offers a billionaire, three idle heirs, a fake ruin, and a lesson about honest work. That is the whole inventory. It is a modest inventory, honestly disclosed, and it will not trouble anyone's conscience for long. A sommelier would call it a light-bodied vintage, drinkable, forgettable, and best not cellared. I have tasted it, logged it, and moved on to the next bottle, which is the only professional courtesy I have left to offer. The score follows from the markers, and the markers follow from the film, and the film follows a formula older than most of its viewers. Such is the trade.

{"review": "Francis Bartek, a Monaco billionaire of Polish origin, decides his three adult children have become intolerable, so he stages a bankruptcy and drags them to a modest house in Marseille where they must find work. The premise is efficient and old. It descends from the Mexican comedy Nosotros los Nobles, which itself reworked a 1949 picture, and a French remake of a Mexican remake of a Mexican original is a genealogy worth pausing over. The film does not pause. It simply sets the machinery running and lets the children collide with employment.

Stella, the spendthrift daughter, becomes a waitress and learns what humiliation feels like from the receiving end. Philippe drives a bike taxi and stumbles into a vintage sneaker venture. Alexandre repaints a house. The moral is plain and gentle: labor dignifies, humility instructs, and a father knows best. There is a faint grumble about inherited wealth here, but the film never follows the thought anywhere uncomfortable. Francis is not a symbol of capital to be dismantled. He is a worried parent with a yacht, and the ending restores him, the money, and the family. The critique is decorative. The rich are not the problem. Lazy rich children are.

On the remaining questions, the film is a void. The cast is homogeneous and the story never considers race, gender politics, sexuality, climate, body image, or neurological difference. The daughter's fiancé turns out to be an impostor with a fake accent, which is the closest the screenplay comes to a social observation, and it is a gag. What remains is a lecture about work ethic, wrapped in a family comedy and delivered by Gérard Jugnot with the weariness of a man who has done this before. It was a hit on Netflix abroad, which tells us something about the appetite for this sort of thing. The film is harmless, tidy, and entirely of another era.", "thematic_tags": ["remake"]}