OSS 117: Alerte Rouge en Afrique Noire
James Bond meets Starship Troopers. It’s a more political Austin Powers, ultra-reactionary.
The Bond references are borderline a ripoff, straight out of the initial credits song. Then Bond reaches the office with the double doors, Moneypenny on the outside, M in the office.
The plot itself is a classic kooky comedy, with the Bond caper. There’s a new agent, OSS 1001, who left for Africa (just a generic country) and is AWOL. Our man in Havana will need to save the day, and bang a lot of pussy in the meantime.
The generic African dictator loves France, which gives him an opportunity for fixing their “free elections”, and our hero and his boss laugh really hard at the concept of independent African colonies.
He gets there on the first hours and immediately flirts with the receptionist. It’s all well and good, but when push comes to shove, the French tricolour is not unfurled, the mast is floppy. Not even leaning back and thinking of Emmanuelle saves him.
The rebels are preparing a coup with one of the several wives, a tribal girl forced to marry him for the tribe cred. She is actually the rebel leader, but her affinity for older man breaks her, she considers our hero of being a potential friend. She quickly reverses course in his moment of post-nut clarity, he reveals himself.
Ultimately, our hero prevails over his replacement, betrays the resistance, and continues to blow a gasket at the potential communist future president Mitterand. His nice Renault is damaged, but nothing that can’t be fixed.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.