Tais Toi (Shut Up)

A French comedy crime caper with three titles Tais Toi (2003) is the original, Shut Up is the English translation and it’s also known as Ruby & Quentin after the two main characters. Quentin, played with complete abandon by Gerard Depardieu, is a small time inept crook who has a daft smile and yearns for a friendship; he ends up in a prison cell with the murderous Ruby (Jean Reno), who plays Hardy to Depardieu’s Laurel, someone he imagines will make a great friend. Ruby on the other hand is a hardened criminal who has been having an affair with his boss’s wife, now deceased! Ruby steals the proceeds of a robbery carried out by his ex-boss Vogel as a sort of pay back.  With Quentin in tow he now has to escape from prison and keep one step a head of Vogel, the Paris Police and the prison psychologist!

Directed and written by Francis Veber, its in a similar vain to the three original Taxi films and Besson’s Subway (1985) in that the script has the same madcap humour played solely for fun and on that level Tais Toi really works.  As a bonus you get some great Paris location shots from the Italian cinematographer Luciano Tovoli who worked on Veber’s best known films The Closet (2001) and Le Diner de Cons (1998) and has recently finished photographing Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D (2012) which to date has not been released in the UK.

Madcap humour from Reno and Depardieu.