The movie follows the exploits of two American brothers (one's adopted), Graham (Paul Rudd) and Allen (Romany Malco), who are left a luxurious mansion by a French uncle neither of them knew. They figure they'll go to France, cash in, and live out their lives in splendor after selling the place, only to find it had a lot of debt and a staff of wacky caretakers. After each gets to know the weird staff, they have their own take on what should happen; Allen gets sentimental and promises them any buyer will have to include the folks as part of the deal to provide for them with Graham takes a more hard-line stance that their welfare is not his concern. Allen's minimal knowledge of French makes the staff think (perhaps correctly) that he's an idiot and much of the humor derives from how two Americans view the natives. The servants, obviously hiding some dark secret from the two brothers, have their own agenda, doing everything in their power to prevent the sale of the mansion. In the end, who will win out in the clash of wills (not to mention cultures), especially when the guys fall for the homely maid, Isabelle (Sylvie Testud)?

The American-as-buffoon or greedy bastard has been a common theme in foreign movies and generally may appeal better to an audience located elsewhere (outside the borders of the USA). The snotty attitude and "you owe me" attitude of the French characters didn't endear them to me either. At this point, you're figuring it'd take a great director to save this one from the scrap heap or perhaps exceptional improvisation skills, and you'd be right. Sadly, no such skill existed here with the story meandering around without focus, the direction sloppy, and the entire movie reeked of an experiment gone awry. That's not to say there were no highlights of the show though, I counted no less than a dozen jokes worth watching a few times but that's small consideration for watching what amounted to a movie so deeply flawed on a technical level as well as a creative level.

While I think there may well be a small contingent of movie goers that would appreciate this film, the stereotypes marred the concept, the technical stuff made it tough to look at, and the few funny parts too spread apart to make this one anything other than a movie worth a rating of Skip It.

Picture: The picture was presented with a choice of the originally filmed 1.85:1 ratio anamorphic widescreen and a modified 1.33:1 ratio full frame color. I wish I could extol the many virtues of the picture quality here but the fact was, it looked horrible. The artifacts were exceptionally numerous and the pixelation reminded me much more of a VCD than a DVD. The video noise and grain were often off the charts as well and I can only wonder what happened in terms of the picture quality. For those who think I'm exaggerating, if anything, I'm being too sweet on it (it was terrible looking).

Sound: The audio was presented in 2.0 Dolby Digital English with optional English and Spanish subtitles. While not quite as bad as the picture, it didn't sound very clear either. The stereo separation was minimal but the biggest problem was the lack of dynamic range and the background noise (maybe something akin to a distant radio channel in terms of noise). The hollow nature of the vocals and minimal care taken with the audio track were possibly due to source material limitations.

Extras: some trailers and a paper insert listing the chapters

Final Thoughts: I wanted to like this one, despite its flaws but the DVD format is very unforgiving of picture flaws and compression issues. If the problems were all related to matters of the picture and sound, I'd probably be able to recommend this one as at least a rental but even then, I'd be cheating you. Rudd and Malco have been far better elsewhere and I'm guessing the supporting cast all have better releases under their belt too but that'd be a guess only considering the lack of material they had to work with this time. MGM has released a lot of interesting movies of late and IFC Films have financed a number of quirky movies that I think are more worthy of release on DVD so look elsewhere for your pleasure unless you're a masochist.