Mortadelo & Filemón: The Big Adventure Javier Fesser Spain 2003
Children apparently love endless pain. Adults love watching pain too, hence Jackass. Computers can provide endless nerve deadening scenarios to live action adaptations of comic books. Pain and discomfort await the characters at every corner (often armed with a sledgehammer). Whether a child actually derives any form of pleasure from this film is beyond me. Mortadelo and Filemon: The Big Adventure is a film of hard knocks.
So much of this was so painfully unfunny to my Anglo-Saxon sensibilities that I almost considered relocating to Tirania, the fabricated European dictatorship at the heart of this taxing ‘romp’. There at least, Hispanic clowns might be banned. Similar but somewhere south of Herge’s Borduria (the Germanic country that threatens Syldvania in the Tintin adventure King Ottokman’s Sceptre), Tirania is led by strongman Calimero, a dictator fixated upon converting Buckingham Palace into low rent apartments. When secret agency TIA has its morale sapping device (the DDT) stolen and sold to Tirania, special agent Freddy Sledgehammer (Dominique Pinoin) is despatched to retrieve it much to the dismay of agents Mortadelo and Filemon.
As the constant barrage of mindless pummelling chiselled my patience away, the more subversive elements of this broad comic book adaptation began to spoor within me. One character tries to fax a cat using a mangle, reminisces how things were that much better under Franco, then the normal reign of mayhem follows. Later a spy is executed to the mood music of ‘I Can Boogie’: more madcap knee-cappings ensue. The Ryder Cup is somehow confused with the Holy Grail: someone urinates on someone-else. A mob is pacified by advert songs and declarations along the lines of ‘Gibraltar is Spanish!”. The most undemanding banal slapstick intermingles with political satire.
Similar to many children’s films seeking a wider audience, Mortadelo and Filemon: The Big Adventure is cynically spring loaded with humour for the adults (who presumably pay and attend films their children watch). Further evidence of this was noticed in the rapping style end credit song - somewhat jarring with the film’s soundtrack up to this point.
