La gran aventura de Mortadelo y Filemón

The Adventures of Mortadello and Filemon is one of those guilty pleasures you never admit seeing (even twice) or enjoying; but surely most of your friends did the same.

Based on a successful Spanish comic, and transformed to the big screen for a J. Fesser, a guy whose previous credit,several years ago, was another mad comedy (with different stile) called `The P Tinto Miracle' . It was a light comedy about two completely innocent people and how the world barely affected them.

This time, Fesser created the funniest movie in years; and I am not talking smiles but gross, uncomfortably, belly laughs. If you are in for sophisticated comedy, look elsewhere. This movie has only one goal, to make you have an excellent time and mostly succeed.

The most amazing thing here, is that this movie relays heavily on special and digital effects which are perfectly used and of excellent quality. Hollywood and George Lucas please take note, this is a Spanish production with a budget about one tenth of any Hollywood project.

The hundreds of special effects are use to create visual gangs, some of the absolutely brilliant. There are so many in the first fifteen minutes, that when the movie tones down you are already addicted.

The story (not really important) is something like this:

A small time crook robs an Army Depressive Gun (applied to soldiers, they get so depressed that they do not want to fight any more) and tries to sell it to a dictator on a country call TYRANNIA. The ultra secret organization TIA (this means aunt in English) assigns a French (or American) secret agent (played by Dominique Pinon from Amelie) to recover it. Jealous, Filemon and Mortadello try to do the same, creating a lot of absurd situations. This is A COMIC, logic is out of the equation. Every situation is a gang (darker, lighter, childish or plain stupid) and most of them really deliver.

As an additional note, the movie, just premiered in his homeland, Spain, classified like PG or General Audiences. The humor is dark sometimes and a few times sexual oriented, but I do not think any kid could understand most of those jokes; so cleverly the creators made, a movie that could be see by kids and adults all of them having a fun time in a different level.

However, probably because European kids seems to be more prepared than American, I wont be surprised if this movie (if ever distributed) gets an `R' rating or several cuts.

I note this, because most good or at least "commercial" foreign movies usually get the worse ratings ("R") or released "UN-RATED" which limit their commercial success. This is done by the MPAA in order to protect Hollywood industry and market, but also limiting culture and knowledge coming from another countries. As an example, a movie like "8 FEMMES "(an important success almost any country) was classified as `R' even when there is no sex, or violence not even dirty talk. However a movie like CHICAGO (a really good movie ) were sex, betrayal and no moral message got a PG-13 (I guess because is musical).

Final advise, release yourself of the crisis and pay a visit to `Mortadello and Filemon' you wont regret it