Just Visiting

It's amazing how something that started out so good could end up so bad. Original director Jean-Marie Poiré brings the stars, Jean Reno and Christian Clavier, of the phenomenal 1993 French film Les Visiteurs to America for this ridiculous remake revolving around knights and knuckleheads. In Medieval times Lord Thibault of Malfete (Reno) mistakenly drank a hexed potion that caused him to see demonic produce-people and kill his own fennel-faced fiancée. The regretful nobleman consults a dimwitted wizard for a spell enabling him to travel back in time, but instead winds up in 21st-century Chicago with a numbskull peasant. There, of course, they run into the modern counterpart of the slain fiancée (Christina Applegate). Searching for a portal back into the tunnels of time, the dimwitted duo encounters every lame fish-out-of-water cliché from the impressive technology of toilets to the mysteries of table manners, with nonsense about self-empowerment tossed in along the way. If that's what you want, stay home and watch Oprah instead.