Père fils thérapie! (2016)
Directed by Émile Gaudreault

Film Review

Emile Gaudreault's 2009 French Canadian film De père en flic was such a hit that the director decided to remake it in France seven years later before embarking on a sequel to the original film back home in Québec. Père fils therapie! is a pretty tame variation on a familiar theme, the archetypal French buddy movie in which two ill-matched characters - here a father and son with a pathological loathing for each other - learn to get along, by taking part in an outdoor activity course.  Clearly, neither of them have seen Philippe Harel's Les Randonneurs (1997).  The film is as corny as it is formulaic, and Gaudreault fails spectacularly to repeat the magic of the original film, despite having some fine acting talent at his disposal and a stunning location, the Verdon Gorge.

As the titular battling father and son, Richard Berry and Waly Dia have a natural comedy rapport which is just about the only thing the film has going for it.  Jacques Gamblin, by contrast, looks horribly out of place in this kind of lowbrow entertainment.  Scripted by Philippe de Chauveron and Guy Laurent, the authors of the 2014 hit comedy Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu, Père fils therapie! is happy churning out stale gags and predictable situations, and what good laughs the film offers are two thin on the ground to make it worth the effort. The same territory has been covered many, many times before, and with far more flair and originality than in this tepid remake.  You wonder why Gaudreault bothered.

Film Synopsis

Jacques Laroche and his son Marc find it impossible to see eye to eye, which is unfortunate as they are both cops working on the same case.  Their mission is to rescue one of their colleagues, who has been kidnapped by Claude Bracci, the leader of a biker gang.  Jacques and Marc's only hope is to gain the confidence of Bracci's lawyer, Charles Perronet, and manoeuvre him into helping them.  To that end, Jacques and his son go undercover and attend a psychotherapy course intended to improve father-son relationships at which Perronet will be present.  By this stage, Marc's relationship with his father is so bad that no end of psychotherapy is likely to help them, but the two men agree to set aside their personal differences for the sake of a colleague in peril...