The success of a joke is in the telling – so maybe A Very Secret Service (Netflix) shouldn’t be judged too harshly by English-speaking audiences. It’s a subtitled comedy about spies in Sixties France, and a viewer might wonder if he’d find it far funnier if he hadn’t flunked French GCSE.
Yet the 2006 movie OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies covered identical terrain in the same language and was hilarious. So the problem here is with the script – beginning with the fact that Secret Service can’t make up its mind what the secret services actually did.
