SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING
Directed by Quentin Dupieux
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆☆

IMAGINE a team of French superheroes, looking roughly something like the Power Rangers, who eject from wrist-based shooters plumes of toxic smoke. Each one commands an element from a cigarette – and they use this with mixed results to take on a bunch of wildly eccentric and creative monsters.

We meet Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi) and Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra) as they do battle with an intergalactic giant turtle – and after being coated in the creature’s innards, their chief Didier, a slobbering rat-like creature, decides they need to go on a retreat to lick wounds.

While we are treated to a series of scenes that come over as individual comedy sketches, there is a slight semblance of a narrative arc. The five have to recharge spiritually and physically for their biggest test yet – Lizardin, the Emperor of Evil (Benoît Poelvoorde), is about to destroy the world and only our tobacco-themed task force can stop him.

Dupieux has a zest for comedy, and multi-layers his jokes so they come at different angles and seemingly covers just about every funny bone. From the simply bizarre to the off-kilter banter between the five heroes and their wonderfully directed comic body language, Dupieux has created something that draws on lots of influences and popular references but somehow manages to feel wholly original. You could say there is an element of 20th-century satire about it all – think Red Dwarf or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

It may be childish and silly, it has some moments of over-the-top grotesqueness, but when you come up with a concept this ridiculous you may as well go full moon on the viewer and see what you can get away with.

That’s what Dupieux does so well – it’s almost as if he has had a focus group of five-year-olds helping him play a game of consequences with the storyline, and for that, we can only be thankful.

The character, Flat Eric, used in music videos and adverts was Dupieux’s creation, and if you can recall the bizarre attraction the hand puppet garnered, you get an idea of what’s in store with his crime-fighting, monster-killing, cigarette-poison-based superhero team.