DIDIER (37)

Directed by: Alain Chabat

Starring: Alain Chabat, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Isabelle Gelinas

The Pitch: A dog turns into a man, eventually becoming a big soccer star.

Theo Sez: A textbook example of why Hollywood can export its dumb comedies all over the world while European equivalents remain strictly for local consumption. Not that it's aggressively dumb, more like a mindless kidpic - but fatally uninventive compared to the smoothly script-doctored products churned out by the US studios. It leaves its FLUKE-in-reverse premise stubbornly undeveloped and its human pooch with (deliberately) nothing to do, perversely amused by its own refusal to make sense : leaving the central transformation unexplained is one thing, but there's also moments like Didier's reluctant master asking the mutt-turned-man, "How did it happen anyway? Did you just morph, like this?" - and, bizarrely, turning for a moment into a man-sized dog (it sounds wild, but it just feels irrelevant). There's a ramshackle sweetness to its low-tech carelessness, and a couple of moments when the silliness actually works (in a silly way), but it's mostly a thin jape, its place among the year's Top Ten grossers in France attributable mainly to its director-star's TV celebrity in that country. The inevitable Hollywood remake (already in development, apparently) should for once be an improvement.