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91The real joy here is the performance of Jean Dujardin, who, besides being very funny as the Gallic Maxwell Smart, is also enormously charismatic and is made to look uncannily (and I do mean uncannily) like the young Sean Connery of "Dr. No" and "Goldfinger."
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83Nest of Spies may be a small, subtitled release, but it's also a gauntlet thrown at the feet of the upcoming big-screen adaptation of "Get Smart." See it and you'll have a substantial idea of what a spy comedy should be.
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83The film bounces along on cheap but entertaining Mel Brooks-worthy audio and visual gags, like the live-chicken-throwing fight, or the sequence where the camera discreetly pans away from Dujardin and a partner making out on his hotel bed--only to focus on a full-length mirror in which they're still fully visible.
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78A consistently entertaining parody that never once makes you feel like an idiot for laughing out loud at its idiocy.
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75For a parody, the movie is surprisingly competent in some of the action scenes, when the dim-witted hero turns out to have lightning improvisational skills.
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75A giddy French comedy.
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75A huge hit in France, Michel Hazanavicius' straight-faced spy spoof unleashes a French operative of incomparable incompetence on the volatile Middle East of 1955.
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75There are more chuckles than laughs, but the film does a witty job of replicating the hermetic, overlit shot language of '60s studio movies.
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70Director Michel Hazanavicius captures the jet-age atmosphere, form-fitting wardrobes, jazz-ethnic soundtrack and bouffant hairdos of JFK/de Gaulle-era espionage films in perfect detail, but it's Dujardin's performance as the suave, confident and utterly clueless Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (to Francophones, a name that drips with phony aristocratic pretension) that gives "OSS 117" its edge.
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A frequently uproarious send-up of Jean Bruce's long-running series of spy novels.
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Light and fun, if also a little slight, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies is like a pleasant sorbet to wash away the aftertaste of the pre-summer clunkers.
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70A spy spoof that -- rarity of rarities -- represents a remake actually worth making. Current comic fave Jean Dujardin plays title character OSS 117 as a kind of James Bond crossed with Maxwell Smart.
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This French comedy fondly lampoons both the popular French spy movies adapted from Jean Bruce's novels in the 1950s and '60s and the colonialist era they were set in.
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63An arch espionage comedy that's never as amusing as it thinks it is.
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63It hardly adds up to much, but it doesn't mean to, and it'll leave you with a cleaner conscience than an Austin Powers picture.
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60Plenty of mileage is derived from Dujardin's dismissal of everything Arab, Michel Hazanavicius also throws in some supremely silly running gags, while keeping the plot moving at a clip and establishing a rapport between the hapless hero and his insouciantly accomplished assistant, Bérénice Bejo.
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A movie whose satire proves as lame as its clunky title.
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50Not that Cairo, Nest of Spies is meant to be a thriller, but even as a self-consciously anachronistic knockabout farce it rarely rises to the level of wit, either verbal or physical.
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30The comedy is strained to the point of lameness, most of it exaggerated clumsiness, stupidity or inappropriateness.
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25Let the French stick to love stories and leave stupid comedies to Tinseltown.
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AlanB.10Great French farce of 60's Spy films with brilliantly comedic performance by Jean Dejardin in the title role of French secret agent OSS 117.
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JackB.10