If Marvel is an apple and DC an orange, this is a boiled hot dog

Written by ZACHARY HAYES

For better or worse, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has cemented the formula for the modern superhero film in our collective consciousness. New entries to this long-oversaturated genre try to shake it up with the latest madcap conceits — meta-anti-hero, multiverse, Super-Pets? — but you can never quite escape the feeling that you’ve seen all this before. When our perfectly primped heroes in flashy costumes aren’t busy trading laser blasts with an army of CGI grunts, they’re spouting cheap expository dialogue in exotic locales about a high-stakes intergalactic threat, a breath here and there for the compulsory 10 cc. of quick, punchy banter. For better or worse, “Smoking Causes Coughing,” Quentin Dupieux’s latest fever dream, contains none of the above: when we first spot the Tobacco Force going glove-to-rubber-claw with a Power Rangers-esque turtle monster in some gorge off the side of the road, we know this is something else entirely.

Yes, the crinkly spandex suits and the low-budget effects clue you into the joke right away, but the true mischief of this film is that it’s not really a superhero parody at all, but rather a surreal horror anthology in vigilante’s underwear. It’s a welcome twist, refreshing in its refusal to engage with genre expectations, but some of the very trope reversals that at first feel so promising leave the film feeling washed out and rudderless by the end.

After suffering from some mild disharmony and a near-fatal lack of “sincerity” in their opening battle, the members of the Tobacco Force — Benzene, Methanol, Nicotine, Mercury, and Ammonia — are sent on a team-building retreat by their green goo oozing, yet remarkably flat rat puppet leader, Didier (Alain Chabat). It is here, in some nondescript forest, that the bulk of the film takes place, the characters dawdling between surreal campfire stories rife with campy gore and horny video chats with their rat-in-chief — but he’s so gross, isn’t that funny?! And yet, despite these over-the-top antics, the film rarely wavers from its lukewarm, water-cooler-chat temperament, an attitude that was clearly meant to be cleverly subversive but rarely sticks the landing.

Outside of a few standout scenes with Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), the members of the Tobacco Force feel rather one-note, leaving the spotlight to fall on the small, but satisfying cast of side characters, including a curiously lucid young girl who appears by the campfire in the night and a cashier who hangs out in the HQ’s corner store market of a fridge and refuses to be objectified. The plodding second half of the film is buoyed by the brief appearance of the “looming” antagonist, Lezardin (Benoit Poelvoorde), his wittily apathetic approach to global destruction making good on the film’s wavering promises of superhero parody. When asked by his similarly disfigured evil son at evil family dinner why he wanted to destroy the Earth, Lezardin responds, “It’s not interesting. I’m putting a sick planet out of its misery.” I can’t say I blame him.

Director, writer, cinematographer, editor, and all-around person responsible Quentin Dupieux is famous for film’s like 2010’s Rubber in which he repeatedly makes the case that sometimes things just happen in movies for “no reason,” a concept as indulgently nihilistic as it is full of potential. There is a peculiar comic appeal to the absurd, one that typically plays out most successfully in its most extreme abuses, but in a film that relies so heavily on its anemically low stakes, I’m left wanting a bit of that cliched punchy banter just to liven things up a bit. In other words, as earnest of an experiment as Smoking Causes Coughing is, I don’t see the TobaccoVerse taking off anytime soon.