The Visitors: Bastille Day (2016)

There is a particular species of fatigue that settles in when a franchise returns after eighteen years to find its audience gone. The Visitors: Bastille Day deposits the medieval knight Godefroy and his squire Jacquouille into 1793, into the Reign of Terror, where they bumble among aristocrats fleeing confiscation and a descendant who serves as public accuser. It was a critical and commercial failure in France. The film proceeds with the grim cheerfulness of a reunion nobody requested, dusting off the same time-travel potion and the same broad physical comedy that carried the 1993 original. The corridors of time, it turns out, lead mostly to the same jokes.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is spare. The cast is a roster of white French comedy regulars, and the lone Black performer occupies a supporting slot without the film pausing to comment on his presence. Three accomplished actresses hold prominent roles, yet the screenplay offers no gender critique, no angle on their positions, nothing beyond the mechanics of farce. The Revolution supplies aristocrats in flight and property under threat, which gestures toward a class grievance, though the film treats confiscation as set dressing for slapstick. Race never enters the frame. Neither does the environment, nor the body, nor the mind's varied wiring. This is a period comedy that wants only to get its knight back to the twelfth century.

What remains is the absence of instruction. The film lectures no one. It sermonizes about nothing. It rewrites no history for ideological purpose, using 1793 purely as a backdrop for mistaken identity and collapsing staircases. A viewer arrives expecting to be scolded and departs merely bored. For a trilogy that has now traveled from the Middle Ages to the Terror, it is a strange achievement to have said so little about anything at all, and to have said it so loudly.