Is this the most original comedy of the year? It’s got to be the most enjoyably bizarre.
Set today, yet styled like an early 1980s TV show, it follows the fortunes of Nicotine Force, a nitwit group of latex-clad superheroes who use tobacco fumes as a weapon to suffocate their enemies.
In order to defeat the dastardly Lizardin, a super-villain hell-bent on world annihilation, our gang is sent on a team-building retreat by their Chief, a Roland Rat-style puppet who drools green goo (for no apparent reason).
From here the action springs off on utterly unpredictable tangents, including one sub-story narrated by a fish.
Without spoiling the surreal delights, we’ll just say it’s a feat to make something so off-puttingly quirky this compelling.
Huge props to French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux (who previously made the horror movie Rubber about a killer tyre) and his uniformly excellent and funny cast.
This brilliant oddity is truly a film like no other.
Out today in cinemas.
