Smoking Causes Coughing

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.

Crazy movie . Laugh out loud moments. Worth a watch

Quentin Dupieux is an absolute genius, and he is hilarious.

Boy am I frustrated. Smoking Causes Coughing started out decent enough (with pretty much all the content in the trailer), but things went downhill fairly fast and then fell off a cliff. There is no plot. Most of the time in the film is spent telling side stories that have nothing to do with the main story, making the whole thing feel extremely unfocused. A big portion of the film relies on gross-out humor that I have a hard time thinking of anyone that would enjoy. The main villain is barely introduced and (SPOILERS AHEAD) killed off without any good reason. The "heroes" do nothing except defeat a creature at the beginning that any group of five could take out. I'm trying to think of anything redeeming about this film and honestly, I really can't (other than a couple chuckles here and there, hence the extra half star). Bottom line: unfocused, terrible pacing, no character development, some of it barely makes any sense, and I want my 80 minutes back. Seriously. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen the whole movie. Very disappointed.

Really? What a mess!