Smoking Causes Coughing

Dupieux pushes the boundaries further than usual in this peculiar film, where numerous absurd moments are treated as mundane within an already bizarre and completely offbeat narrative. This results in an incredibly humorous experience, particularly if you enjoy this type of peculiar humor. Be prepared to laugh—a lot.

A comedy that isn't funny, there's a good premise here but the film doesn't fire. Part farce and part tribute, the 81 minutes is utterly forgettable. When an oversexed rat is your most fun character your movie has lost the path. Final Score: 3.7/10

Didn't work for me on any level. Not sure what this Dupieux guy is 'smoking' but it isn't what I'm used to. The attempts at dark humor (I'm guessing that's what it was meant to be. ???) are put across poorly. It's as if these were just drama actors who don't know how to 'say things funny'. Then again, maybe it's partly a translation thing. The robot wasn't funny. The dick joke wasn't even funny, though feeble water strength and their scrubbing each other was worth a chuckle. I really could've used some laughs today, but this sucky clunker (sunker?) wasn't it. Hell, not even proof that her headlights were bigger. 2 stars

I don't know what I've just watched but, but by jingo, I enjoyed it.

A waste of time, not funny at all. It is a failed wannabe dark humour.

The only movie that matters.

A dream cast for a French comedy that simply did not make me laugh once. The movie may be the joke.

Some funny moments in a quirky/ surreal sense, but very bizarre plot that goes nowhere. A waste of time, on the whole.

Beginning like a French piss-take of Power Rangers with the super-powered Tobacco Force fighting what's clearly a man in a giant turtle suit, things turn even more surreal and absurd as they embark on a team cohesion building exercise which mainly involves the film detouring into Tales of the Crypt style scary stories, my favourite being the one told by a talking fish. This is my first experience of French writer-director Quentin Dupieux and while I don't think I'm quite on his bizarre wavelength, I can appreciate the inventiveness and boldness he clearly demonstrates here, even if I've no idea what he's trying to satirize with these discursive stories. From the nonsensical title, translated directly from its original French one, to the loose and random elements and story-lines which feel like leftover ideas from unfinished projects, stitched together Frankenstein style, nothing makes any cohesive sense here but there's charm in his lo-fi, ramshackle approach, with a dedicated cast led by recognizable French actors like Gilles Lellouche and Vincent Lacoste, who has clearly thrown caution and perhaps dignity to the wind with their silly costumes or when they're professing their love and affection to Chief Didier, a womanizing green goo-dripping rat voiced by Alain Chabet. At which point, I'm sure if I'm more familiar with French cinema, I'd picked up more of the sly in-jokes littered all over the film. At a brisk 80mins, the ending is so meaninglessly abrupt, you'd think the filmmaker had just given up or suddenly realized COVID lockdown is over and they can therefore leave the mostly isolated film set they're in. Quite possibly written and made after smoking of a special kind, I suspect viewers might also need to do the same to fully appreciate this strange, ridiculous, though intermittently funny, film.

Felt played out to have the women falling all over the rat boss.