Review: Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Reviews

Mon Meilleur Ami | My Best Friend

Yet another mismatched-buddy pairing

By MICHAEL ATKINSON | July 3, 2007

2.0 Stars

MON MEILLEUR AMI|MY BEST FRIEND: A best friend in 10 days? ...Never.

The opening-night entry of this year’s Boston French Film Festival, Patrice Leconte’s tetchy and grimly unamusing little comedy positions Daniel Auteuil, in yet another mismatched-buddy pairing, as an unlikable antiques dealer who’s compelled — in a bizarre bet instigated by a tableful of despicable but ostensible friends — to find a “best friend” in 10 days or give up the ancient Greek vase on which he spent too much of his gallery’s cash. The set-up is so labored and unconvincing that it hardly matters when our rodentine hero latches onto Dany Boon’s gregarious trivia buff/cab driver and is instructed in the ways of basic sociability. Boon is meant to be likable, and he is (though one can already see the Adam Sandler remake coming at us like a flung turd), but Leconte, returning to his lackluster ’70s-’80s period of tone-deaf farce, focuses like a West Hollywood executive on penny-ante moralizing.

Related: Power hungry?, Dreamland, February 23, 2006, More

Topics: Reviews , Culture and Lifestyle, Relationships, Daniel Auteuil, More

| More

ARTICLES BY MICHAEL ATKINSON

REVIEW: THE DEEP BLUE SEA | March 29, 2012
Like a bad dream trapped in amber, Terence Davies's studied film adaptation of Terence Rattigan's famous 1952 play is both spectrally beautiful and frozen in self-regard.

REVIEW: YOU ARE ALL CAPTAINS | November 08, 2011
A sublime meta-fictional trifle that evokes Abbas Kiarostami's '90s mirror-films of children, Oliver Laxe's jaunt lands in a semi-rural Moroccan school for orphans.

REVIEW: WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN | November 02, 2011
Made as a communal experiment, the film is an avalanche of amateur avant-garde hijinks, closer to Brakhage and Markopoulos than to Hollywood.

REVIEW: STRAW DOGS | September 20, 2011
Remaking, polishing, and in effect housebreaking what should've remained untamed and feral, Rod Lurie's new version of the Peckinpah classic follows the original's story beats closely, and so the devil is in the details.

REVIEW: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MCKINLEY NOLAN | August 30, 2011
An investigative doc brimming with cultural resonance and historical savvy, Henry Corra's film has ahold of a pungent story — that of the titular black Texan fella who vanished in Vietnam 40 years ago.