The setup for Smoking Causes Coughing, the latest film from French director Quentin Depieux, is an absolute winner. It’s as simple as this: imagine Power Rangers, but with ultra-violence, a cigarette-based slant, and plenty of self-aware satire. This may sound great on paper – and I believe somewhere it still could be great – but Smoking Causes Coughing never quite manages to make good on its premise.

The film follows the Tobacco Force, a troupe of Power Rangers-style heroes who use the toxic fumes in cigarettes to do battle with their enemies. Headed by the stoic Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), they take down their toughest foe yet: a rubber-suit lizard that wouldn’t look out of place in a 90s Sentai episode. But their lack of team cohesion concerns Chef Didier (voiced by Alain Chabat), a puppet rat dribbling bile down its chin, who acts as their Zordon equivalent. Sent on a week-long retreat to build up their team spirit again, all hells breaks loose while they’re away.

Throughout its first act, Smoking Causes Coughing looks set to make the most of its inherently satirical DNA. The pastiche of Power Rangers and other cheesy 90s action shows is on full display to great effect, with a much pulpier outlook that doesn’t shirk on the gore and guts. The script, also penned by Depieux, is truly hilarious in these moments, unpicking everything you remember from your childhood media and giving it a satirical spin.

But there comes a point where Smoking Causes Coughing turns into a series of unrelated horror vignettes, where things begin to fall apart. First up is a ten-minute long story told by one of the troupe, which has all the earmarks of foreshadowing a villain’s origin story. Then not long after, we get two more of these sequences, some longer than others, but all seemingly irrelevant to the plot at large. I was hoping it’d soon become clear what sort of role they play in the narrative, but this moment never comes.

It’s frustrating, because Smoking Causes Coughing becomes spliced with these anecdotes that take us away from the characters and world-building achieved prior to their inception. It feels like tearing away the wit and creative spark Depieux exudes through the witty direction and razor-sharp script, with no benefit to the film at large. Perhaps it’s there to pad out the already brief 77-minute runtime, but Smoking Causes Coughing would be a much better film if it zeroed in on its strongest feature.

That said, when it zeroes in on a more adult and seedy side of Saturday morning superheroes, it’s hard not to have a good time. The Tobacco Squad themselves aren’t the most fleshed out, but each one gets a chance to sparkle, from the hapless Methanol (Vincent Lacoste) struggling with Insomnia to Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier) secretly pining for their rodent leader. I’d have much preferred some more time learning about these characters over interruptions from short-story asides.

It’s still worth watching as a whole, because Depieux clearly revels in dissecting and deconstructing the contemporary superhero genre. The ‘big bad’ comes and goes in the blink of an eye, there’s no rollicking final battle to get pulses racing, and our heroes are far weirder and less immediately magnetic than anything coming out of Marvel or DC.

A strong creative spark clearly permeates the filmmaking in Smoking Causes Coughing, but it’s the inconsistent pacing and downright frustratingly lengthy anecdotes that rip up the momentum and really pull you out of the experience. I’d still recommend watching for its characters and ceaseless satirical charm, but Smoking Causes Coughing could’ve been so much more.

★★½

Smoking Causes Coughing is out in cinemas on July 7, 2023.

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