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The Visitors Movie Review

The Visitors (Les Visiteurs) is a 1993 French fantasy comedy film directed by Jean-Marie Poire and starring Jean Reno and Christian Clavier. It’s a surprisingly solid, funny flick.

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“Limp scrotum! Limp scrotum!“

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A medieval knight and his servant ask a familiar wizard to move them back in time to prevent father-in-law’s accidental killing. Instead, they fly away to the 20th century. This remains one of the highest-grossing French movies of all time and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a crowd pleaser in every sense of that word, though it is obviously more intended for French and European audiences to enjoy properly.

The plot is pretty solid and the fantastical elements really worked. It’s a goofy time travel flick that is not to be taken seriously. The production design and costumes are superb and so are the quite advanced for their time VFX. The movie also has a wonderful, classical score that accompanied each scene very well. It’s surprising how technically polished it is all-around.

Jean Reno and Christian Clavier were both perfectly cast. Reno plays more of a straight character, though he still got to be funny at times. He’s very believable in the role of this heroic buffoon from the Middle Ages. Clavier is the comedic highlight. Yes, some of his character’s facial expressions were too over-the-top, but for the most part he managed to make me laugh as he received so many memorable lines of dialogue and terrific slapstick moments.

He also played his gay descendant from the present and the contrasting personalities of the two were so interesting and just so much fun to watch. Valerie Lemercier herself was lovely as basically the only straight character of the bunch. Her dynamic with her ancestor was quite moving and charming.

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The Visitors has humor that ranges from too ridiculous and over-the-top to genuinely funny and/or hilarious. The quickness of its pacing was a turn off for me and so were those scenes that portrayed way too much mayhem and shouting. The highlights included the two characters reacting and failing to adapt to the modern world. The scene where they trash the car (“the devil’s chariot”) was the funniest moment in a film full of these crazy scenes that made great use of its time travel premise to mine some laughs. It’s not for everybody, but if watched in the right frame of mind, you are bound to enjoy this quirky French farce.