BEFORE: And this is the reverse of "A Connecticut Yankee", with a knight traveling forward to modern times. This will be the last movie about time-travel in the chain, I swear.
THE PLOT: A knight and his valet are transported from the 12th century to the year 2000. There the knight meets some of his family and slowly learns what this new century is like.
AFTER: This is a remake of a French film called "Les Visiteurs", and features a unique way of traveling through time, via a wizard's potion. The wizard meant to send the knight back in time just a few hours, to prevent the death of his fiancée, but instead transports him forward to the year 2000.
Thibault, the knight (Jean Reno) and André, his idiot peasant manservant wake up in a medival museum exhibit in Chicago, and have to deal with a strange new world of cars, television and indoor plumbing. It's a slow process, and there's lots of slow slapstick as they dispense ice cubes all over the kitchen floor, fall down, bathe with toilet water, eat dog food, etc.
They encounter Julia (Christina Applegate), a museum curator who looks exactly like Rosalind, Thibault's deceased love from the 14th century - so logically, she must be his descendant (what are the odds?) and this must mean that he eventually returns to the past to rescue Rosalind, and succeeds in having descendants. For that they'll need the help of the wizard (Malcolm McDowell) who also drank his own potion and traveled to the modern world - but he seems more comfortable in the future, wearing cowboy hats and knowing how to book a hotel room.
Interesting casting for Malcolm McDowell, since he's been typecast as a villain for the past couple of decades, plus he had roles in at least 2 other movies about time-travel: "Time After Time" and "Star Trek: Generations"...
Thibault learns about the modern world, and how to treat other people with respect, from his great-great-great-great granddaughter, and Julia learns to assert herself and cast off her cheating boyfriend, who was only interested in her inheritance anyway. Meanwhile, André does pretty well for himself, hooking up with a neighbor's gardener (Tara Reid) and pawning a stolen 14th century artifact for cash...
Cameos from George Plimpton as a museum curator and Kelsey Grammar as the narrator.
RATING: 6 out of 10 urinal cakes (mmm...minty!)
Like Thibault, I'm going back to Medieval Times, and I'll be spending a week there watching films about (what else?) more knights...
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