Movie Reviews

Following the success of 2008’s Bienvenue Chez Les Ch’tis, it’s surprising that it took writer/director/actor Dany Boon ten years to release a sequel. Well, it’s actually more of a spinoff. And it’s even more surprising that it took him this long to end up with a movie as crappy as this one. La Ch’tite Famille once again sees Boon playing a lovable, heavily accented man from the northern part of France but other than that the movie doesn’t have a lot in common with the first one.

Valentin (Boon) and his girlfriend Constance (Laurence Arne) are the hottest furniture designers around and they are about to celebrate a retrospective of their work at a fancy museum in Paris. Valentin has always claimed to be an orphan in the press and has tried his hardest to bury his roots under a heavy coating of Parisian smugness. That’s because he’s ashamed of his family who are very much alive running an auto salvage lot and speaking in a dialect that even the French have a hard time understanding.

But guess what? His orphan story is about to get blown out of the water because his whole family is on the way to the retrospective. A few scenes after the big reveal, Valentin gets hit by a car and later by a severe case of amnesia. Gone is his Parisian smugness. Instead he is back to his Ch’ti roots, which quickly becomes a sh’tick that gets played off until you are sick and tired of it.

La Ch’tite Famille doesn’t come anywhere near the first movie in terms of charm, lovable characters and well, good jokes. Instead it is a pretty bad comedy that manages to land a few laughs but is already forgotten about by the time the credits start to run.