YMMV / Les Visiteurs

• Awesome Music:
  • The epic Ominous Latin Chanting-like "Enae Volare" by Era, which is the franchise's most well known theme.
  • The equally epic opening theme of the first film, "The Knight of Montmirail", which is heavily inspired by Michael Kamen's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves theme.
  • The opening track of The Corridors of Time, "Voices from the Past", also by Era.
  • The films' ending scenes famously feature a snippet of Felix Mendelssohn's "Violin Concerto in E minor".
  • In Bastille Day:
    • "The Mother of God".
    • "À moi la garde!", with a variation on "Enae Volare".
    • The electro remix of "Enae Volare" in the end credits.
• Critic-Proof: Critical reception to The Corridors of Time was lukewarm skewing negative. It still was the third highest-grossing film in France in 1998 with approximately 8 million tickets sold. It was only surpassed by Le Dîner de Cons (9 million) and Titanic (20.5 million) that year.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Bastille Day was lambasted by critics, but many agreed that Nicolas Vaude playing Maximilien Robespierre was probably the best thing about it. Probably a case of Took the Bad Film Seriously.
• First Installment Wins: The first film is still unanimously considered as the best. The least said about the remake the better.
• Fountain of Memes: Both Jacquouille and Godefroy have generated many memes on French web communities and social media, making ample use of their faux old French and Jacquouille's iconic antics.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the first film, Godefroy lying to Jacquouille about the fact that the Time Travel has started to rot him from the insides to convince him to come back to The Middle Ages. By Bastille Day, the bodies of both of them are rotting for real (Rapid Aging then tumors) from too much Time Travels.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The critical consensus regarding The Corridors of Time.
• Memetic Mutation: The film's tremendous success upon release in France, its multiple reruns on TV up to this day and, of course, the Internet, helped cementing its memorable quotes in French pop culture:
  • "OH-KAAAAAY!!!"
  • "MONTJOIE! SAINT-DENIS!" and "Que trépasse si je faiblis!"
  • "Bourse molle!"
  • "C'est diablerie!"
  • "Sache que le Roy ne se prend point, même au jeu d'échecs !"
  • "Messiiiire! Messiiiiire! Un Sarrasin!"
  • "C'EST DES MALADES!"
  • "Merci la gueuse! Tu es un laideron mais tu es bien bonne!"
  • "Il pleut comme vache qui pisse!"
  • "Jour! Nuit! Jour! Nuit! Jour! Nuit!"
  • "Mais qu'est-ce que c'est que ce bin's?!"
  • "Mais dehors les romanos!"
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Several Les Visiteurs video games were released by Ubisoft around the release of The Corridors of Time, and none of them was well received.
  • Les Visiteurs: La Relique de Sainte Rolande is a third-person adventure game that received negative reviews (mostly for its bad graphics, horrible camera angles, out-of-place fantasy creatures way beyond the Low Fantasy approach of the films, and badly designed labyrinth-like levels). It has been reviewed by Joueur du Grenier here.
  • Les Visiteurs on Game Boy Color didn't receive much better reviews.
  • Les Visiteurs on PC, a boring and glitchy Point-and-Click Game (and the characters' modelizations were pretty awful, even at the time). It uses a lot of bits from the first two films as cutscenes.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Valérie Lemercier's roles, Frénégonde de Pouille and Béatrice de Montmirail, were among the most lauded things about the first film, especially her Sour Prude portrayal of Béatrice, to the point she won a César Award for Best Supporting Role for it. She refused to come back for the sequel out of Creative Differences and was replaced in both roles by Muriel Robin (complete with a Flashback with the Other Darrin) and it didn't sit well with fans and critics. Robin looks nothing like Lemercier, the writing of her Béatrice lacks the wit and nuance of Lemercier's version or interesting things to do, and she poorly tries to imitate the posh accent Lemercier had.
  • Longtime fans were left wondering why Ganelon and Enguerrand le Balafré were replaced by two other men-at-arms in the medieval sequences of Bastille Day, for no apparent reason (the actors had aged, but The Other Darrin could have worked).
• Retroactive Recognition: The supermarket security agent who tries to stop Jacquouille's rampage there wll be familiar to Kaamelott fans, he was played by Philippe Nahon, a.k.a. Goustan the Cruel in the latter series (and passed before the movie was made).
• Sequelitis: So far, none of the sequels has surpassed the original (or has even lived up to it). The Corridors of Time did not get anywhere near as good a reception as the first and Bastille Day was the most critically panned.

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