Fridae

Once upon a time, we could count on Hollywood delivering silly summer blockbusters, high-octane action movies, slasher flicks, and formulaic romcoms. I suppose it's a sign of progress that French cinema has finally caught up with Hollywood. Just this past year for instance, I've watched a low-brow comedy about Spanish maids in Paris and a brains-free action flick about some elite soldiers complete with a rock-and-roll soundtrack. And with Second Chance, a very predictable romcom tweaked to please audiences, French cinema completes its transformation into a cut-rate Hollywood.

The gimmick is what we might have seen in Hitch: an unconventional yet efficacious marriage counsellor (Demaison) falls for an attractive prospect (Efira) following a meet cute at a church wedding where his services are called for. The twist is while French Hitch may be a fine catch with his unassuming humour, winsome personality, and intrinsic understanding of what women want, any woman who dates him is cursed with so much bad luck, they make the victims in Final Destination look like lucky winners of the karmic lottery.

The many jokes in this film function on the level of having someone slip on a banana peel – i.e. watching how someone's day gets screwed up in every possible way. Between the escalating mishaps that befall the romcom couple and their attempts to deal with the so-called curse, you have all the possible jokes that you could throw into the film.

Second Chance is very easy to watch and very enjoyable due to how easily the film writes itself and how little it strays from its arsenal of cheap, predictable, yet effective jokes. And since it's still a French film at heart, even the sillier of its gags still come across as sexy in a way that sexually-frank American comedies cannot.