Which trio featuring two white men and a black one, immediately comes to your mind? In France, the most likely answer will be the popular humorists Didier Bourdon, Bernard Campan and Pascal Légitimus, also known as "the Unknowns", and the Biblical Magi might come right after.
But the comparison was inevitable and it even concluded their previous film, "The Three Brothers" where they were nicknamed the 'King Magi' (literally) in a cute, if not predictable gag. Well, who would have thought that simple line would have paved the way to their second film, "The Magi", marking their come-back, six years after the group split, which was enough an event to warrant a a fair success, plus the fact that it relied on the same concept than "The Visitors", another hit featuring anachronistic characters discovering the modern world..
"The Magi", is much inferior to "The Visitors" and works as a one-joke movie, it just avoids crossing the dullness line, and this a feat many promising comedies fail to achieve. Still, the trio was so careful not to bore the viewers that the film isn't transcending either and get very predictable at times. The audience responded realistically as the film attracted less than two million viewers, while "The Three Brothers", with seven million was the highest grossing film of 1995.
And you could really tell by the time the film was released, that no one really discussed about it, it quickly sunk into oblivion like a bad parenthesis in the Unknowns' career, whose flame was revived by the release of their TV sketches' DVD a few years after. But since the film's release, it has become a sort of a cult-classic, rerun on TV especially during Holidays, and when I had to watch it again, I realized that many moments were more pleasant than what my memories kept.
First of all, any tiresome gimmick, when handled properly, can avoid redundancy. The fun comes from the fact that these guys diverge from the usual time travelers, they bear an unlimited knowledge, they speak all the languages thus never act in a goofy or over the top way, although they're genuinely impressed by the miracle of technology, from a plane, or a light-bulb (whose description is brilliantly written). And their encounters with lesser incarnations of modernity such as a refreshing towelette or a public WC cabin, mistaken for a house, provide some good laughs, too.
Some jokes get more predictable than others, like when Balthazar (Bourdon) tells a young girl that she's so pretty he might buy her for a few mules or even a donkey, we know the answer will be "you do have a way with with women". But these are a few low spots for some brilliant moments popping up every once in a while, like when they go to a nightclub and Balthazar addresses the Asian barman "Mongol", a reminiscence of the Black guy called a Sarasin in "The Visitors". The problem with "The Magi" is that it manages to be funny, but never original.
The only bit of inventiveness is in the writing and the characterization of the Magi, all charming and appealing, even in a weird way, while "The Visitors" relied on the medieval ignorance of its protagonists, the Magi are funny because they act naturally despite their super powers (carried by some good but overused CGI) and the joke is on the people they meet, and the hysteria they provoke on their path. The problem is that they are the only fully developed characters and no one is capable to steal their thunder, so the world and people surrounding them isn't much interesting. That's what undermined the film, because the story needed the Biblical trio, but also the two main characters of the Nativity: Mary and Joseph.
I don't think this is much a spoiler because when Balthazar meets in the airport a poor tormented girl named Masha, and Melchior (Campan) a young Arab dealer named Jo, we know this is leading somewhere. Masha isn't pregnant, but a child might pop up somewhere and become a source of happiness. The film works like a build-up to a climax that cleverly uses the subway stations as modern-day recreation of the Nativity, but it's not much satisfying for all that and that's because the film didn't make us care more for other characters than the Magi, so what should have been the highlight of the film becomes a cute but forgettable conclusion.
I checked out on IMDb and it seems that the actors who played both Masha and Jo didn't have much a career after that. If not deserved, it's understandable given the lack of charisma and passion they display in the film, it's probably the script that is to blame, but some lines delivered with more passion could have made us root for Masha who looked and sounded bored, no matter the emotion she was supposed to show. And Jo was a rather passive character, but so was Joseph I guess. It seems that the trio was aware of that as they tried to move the film in other directions, one of them, relevant, is the media frenzy that followed their discovery, and where the only interesting character is actually the one who believes their story, the cunning media executive played by Claude Brosset.
We have some great speeches about the rise of the Internet, a TV show where the Magi are confronted to some pompous historians or hysterical Christians, and it's followed by a chaotic chase sequence, everything goes suddenly too fast so that these well-meant plot devices feel like conventional time-fillers that could have work if they were given more time.
That half-baked third act and anticlimactic conclusion sealed the fate of "The Magi" and it's no wonder that the Unknowns didn't work together again for one decade, as if the magic that made them the three Kings of comedy in the 90's still operated.
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