One Of Rotten Tomatoes' Highest Rated Superhero Movies Is A Gem Waiting To Be Discovered
Quentin Dupieux's bizarre 2022 film "Smoking Causes Coughing" might be the best superhero movie of the 2020s, and I include "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" in that statement. ("Smoking Causes Coughing" has a 94% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. "Brand New Day" only has a 90%.) "Smoking Causes Coughing" tells the story of the Tobacco Force, a quintet of French superheroes who, each named after a cigarette chemical, use the power of smoking to defeat evil. The team consists of Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi), and Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra). They are joined by their robot Norbert (Ferdinand Canaud), and they are given orders by their boss, Chief Didier (voiced by Alain Chabat), a nasty-looking rat puppet who also just happens to be a sexually irresistible dynamo.
"Smoking Causes Coughing" begins, as many superhero flicks do, with an action sequence to get the audience in the mood for the mayhem to come. The action, however, is of the low-rent, early-'80s tokusatsu variety, and the fight is against a rubbery turtle monster called Tortusse. They defeat Tortusse by giving him cancer, which inexplicably causes him to explode. After the opening fight, the members of the Tobacco Force turn to a nearby family who had been watching and remind them that cigarettes are a force for good in the world. But don't start smoking. It's a nasty habit.
Instead of charging off into a mission of action and international intrigue, the Tobacco Force are ordered to take a break. They are forced to a lakeside trailer to reconnoiter and wait for further instructions. While waiting around, the members of the Tobacco Force decide to tell each other stories. It's here that the movie starts to get really bizarre.
Smking Causes Coughing is a post-Adult Swim absurdist superhero anthology horror comedy
The bulk of the jaunty 80 minutes of "Smoking Causes Coughing" is devoted to the stories that the Tobacco Force tells one another while bumming around the lake and in their trailer. You might think the stories are thematically linked, but Quentin Dupieux aggressively tries to keep everything as close to a non-sequitur as possible. Some might know Dupieux from his bonkers movies "Rubber," "Wrong," "Wrong Cops," "Mandibles," or "Daaaaaalí!," and will understand that he operates in a stream-of-consciousness milieu not too far afield from what you might run into on Adult Swim late at night while under the influence of THC.
The first of the two stories in "Smoking Causes Coughing" is about a magical helmet that turns its wearer into a murderous nihilist. A woman puts on the helmet during a vacation retreat and ends up killing her family to free them of the burden of living. It's funnier than it sounds. In the second story, a man falls into a wood chipper, but thanks to bureaucracy, his bosses aren't allowed to help him out. Being slowly ground up doesn't seem to hurt the man, though, and he even comments on the action after he's been reduced to a mouth floating on top of a bucket of viscera.
Oh yes, and there is still the matter of this film being a superhero movie, and Dupuiex eventually circles around to Lézardin (Benoît Poelvoorde), the evil emperor of the universe who wants to destroy the Earth. Luckily for everyone, Lézardin's family hates his everlovin' guts. The ending is dark. Or is it? The film is too whimsical to be dark.
What did critics think of Smoking Causes Coughing?
One might read many film reviews that discuss a film's cohesion or its tightly written script that efficiently metes out the traditional plot beats. "Smoking Causes Coughing" — and indeed, most of the oeuvre of Quentin Dupieux — stands in defiance of such notions. The film isn't meant to be coherent, and it succeeds with flying colors. It's a series of strange, deadpan gags and unexplained conceits that the audience will either chuckle along with or be confused by. I was tickled by the fact that the trailer where much of the film's action takes place is equipped with a full grocery store hidden inside a cabinet.
Most critics were able to fall in line with Dupieux's hangdog energy, enjoying its glorious stupidity. Simon Abrams, writing for RogerEbert.com, deftly described the film thus:
"You might still come across 'Smoking Causes Coughing' without any knowledge or interest in Dupieux or his post-Theater of the Absurd humor. Maybe you like superheroes or surreal, low-brow humor. In any case, to enjoy 'Smoking Causes Coughing,' you have to want to periodically trick yourself into believing that it's a more sensible movie than it is, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary."
As mentioned, most of the reviews were positive on this bonkers little movie. We interviewed Dupieux about it. Sadly, it was also too weird to live. It barely had a release in the United States and only made $1.1 million overall. It can currently be seen on services like Hoopla and Kanopy, and rented on various other online outlets. You probably already know if you're going to love this movie. I certainly did. I thought it was one of the best movies of its year.