OSS 117: From Africa with Love

The first thing I noticed wasn't the tuxedo or the Cairo-grade smirk; it was the eyebrow. Jean Dujardin still has that impossibly expressive ridge of hair that communicates a level of undeserved confidence most world leaders would envy. But when OSS 117: From Africa with Love (originally Alerte rouge en Afrique noire) kicks off, it’s 1981, and that confidence is finally starting to look a little... creased.

I watched this while my radiator was making a rhythmic clanking sound like a dying Morse code operator, and honestly, the industrial groaning of an aging machine felt like a perfect companion piece to Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath. It’s been twelve years since we last saw France’s most oblivious secret agent in Lost in Rio, and the jump from the Technicolor 1960s to the synth-heavy, neon-trimmed 80s is more than just a costume change. It’s a collision between a relic and a reality that’s stopped laughing at his jokes.

A Change of Guard in the 1980s

The biggest hurdle this film faced wasn't a fictional African coup; it was the absence of Michel Hazanavicius. The director who helped Jean Dujardin win an Oscar for The Artist walked away from this third installment, leaving the keys to Nicolas Bedos. For fans of the first two cult classics, this felt like a risky "legacy sequel" move. We live in an era of franchise saturation where every brand is stripped for parts, and I went in wondering if OSS 117 was about to suffer the same fate as those tired Indiana Jones or Die Hard sequels that forget why we liked the hero in the first place.

Bedos leans hard into the 1981 aesthetic. The opening credits are a pitch-perfect riff on the Roger Moore-era Bond titles, all silhouettes and heavy shadows. The cinematography by Laurent Tangy ditches the retro-filtered warmth of the previous films for something crisper, colder, and more industrial. It looks expensive—and it was, with a $20 million budget that unfortunately didn't quite find its feet at the post-pandemic box office. But while it looks like a modern action flick, it’s still playing with the DNA of a parody.

The Kid Stays in the Picture

The smartest move screenwriter Jean-François Halin made was introducing a foil. Enter Pierre Niney as Serge, aka OSS 1001. Serge is young, tech-savvy, physically capable, and—most importantly—not a raging bigot. He represents the "Modern Frenchman" of the early Mitterrand era, making Hubert look like a dinosaur who missed the extinction event.

The chemistry between Jean Dujardin and Pierre Niney is where the film breathes. Dujardin is a master of physical comedy; he plays Hubert as a man who is essentially a human garbage fire in a very well-tailored suit. Watching him try to navigate 1980s computer tech or compete with a younger man’s stamina is hilarious, mostly because Hubert refuses to acknowledge he’s losing. Pierre Niney plays the straight man with a weary, blinking disbelief that I found incredibly relatable. He’s us, the audience, wondering how this man is still alive, let alone employed.

Action with an 80s Gloss

Since this is an action-adventure, the set pieces have to do some heavy lifting. The choreography here is a bit more "modern" than the stiff, staged fights of the first two films. There’s a chase sequence and a prison break that actually have some weight to them. Bedos doesn't rely on shaky-cam or the "chaos cinema" of the early 2010s; he keeps the camera wide enough to see the stunts.

The practical effects are a highlight. In a current cinema landscape where everything is smoothed over with CGI "slop," seeing real cars kicking up dust in Africa (actually filmed largely in Kenya) feels refreshing. The stunts aren't "superheroic"; they’re messy and painful. When Hubert takes a hit, you feel the 1981-ness of it—it’s grimy, sweaty, and slightly uncoordinated. It captures that transition period where action movies were moving away from gentlemanly brawls toward the more visceral style of the Lethal Weapon era.

The Problem with Hubert in 2021

We have to talk about the elephant in the room: Hubert’s "worldview." The OSS 117 films have always been a satire of French colonial arrogance and 1950s sexism. However, releasing this in 2021 was a different beast than 2006. In our current era of heightened awareness and social media discourse, some of the jokes about African politics and "assisting" local regimes feel a lot sharper—and occasionally, they draw blood.

I found myself wincing more than I did during the previous movies. Not because the film is endorsing Hubert’s views—it clearly isn't—but because the world has changed so much that the satire feels uncomfortably close to home. The film attempts to address this by having characters like Zéphyrine Bamba, played with a cool, dangerous grace by Fatou N'Diaye, constantly outsmarting Hubert. She isn't just a "Bond Girl"; she’s the smartest person in the room, and she knows it. The film tries to balance the "ignorant hero" trope with a modern lens, but it’s a tightrope walk that doesn't always stay steady.

OSS 117: From Africa with Love is a gorgeously shot, well-acted curiosity that suffers slightly from the "third movie" slump. It’s funny, yes, and Jean Dujardin is a national treasure for a reason, but the shift in tone from Hazanavicius’s whimsical parody to Bedos’s more grounded, cynical approach makes it feel like a different animal. It’s a fascinating look at how we handle legacy characters in a post-Bond, post-pandemic world. It’s not quite the masterpiece the first one was, but if you want to see a handsome idiot accidentally stumble his way through a revolution, it’s a solid way to spend two hours.

The film serves as a reminder that while the world moves on, Hubert will always be there, mispronouncing names and offending everyone in the room. He is the ultimate relic—a man who thinks he’s the main character in a movie that everyone else has already turned off. It’s a bit tragic, mostly ridiculous, and still worth a watch for the sheer commitment of Dujardin's grin.