There was something very special in the chemistry between French actors Gerard Depardieu and Pierre Richard that was lacking in the Martin Short, Danny Glover comedy team. In fact, the trio of comedy films that Depardieu and Richard did together was quite funny: Les Comperes, Les Fugitifs, and La Chevre. Each of those films was re-made by Hollywood (Father's Day, Three Fugitives, and Pure Luck) but each unfortunately fell short of the hilarious originals. The original Depardieu character in La Chevre was an impatient take-charge man who always had to exercise self-control in the presence of the guy with bad luck, knowing all the while that he was really the professional private eye and the competent one and forced to play along with the Richard character's self-delusions about his own investigative prowess. Depardieu was the rational Cartesian man who didn't believe in good or bad luck and you had the constant feeling he was about to boil over as the Pierre Richard character continually proved him wrong. I felt there was a more dramatic turnaround in this character's eventual dumbstruck realization that good and bad luck existed in the original comedy. His wide-eyed disbelief at the end when they found the missing girl was an emotional high-point in the original, whereas the American version wasn't nearly as moving. I didn't feel the mounting sense of frustration and aggravation from the Danny Glove character, who played it a little too coolly, in my opinion. Also, Pierre Richard's character in the original approached every incident of bad luck with the same comic serene self-confidence as though it were something completely normal. I didn't get this sense of Barney Fife nerdish swagger as the man who thought he was in charge of the mission from the Martin Short character. Above all, I didn't see the same degree of conflict between the two characters that ended in true affection in the re-make as I saw in the original. They were too nice to each other throughout the film. In the original, the Pierre Richard character tries to physically attack the Depardieu character in the end, but only succeeds in badly hurting himself. The American version doesn't involve this conflict at the end. The characters in the American version didn't seem to have as firm a grasp on who they were. Nonetheless, the idea of the film is very original (a man with total bad luck is the last resort for finding a missing girl who has identical uniform bad luck) and Pure Luck is a film that is a lot of fun to watch. Even though Danny Glover and Martin Short didn't seem to "get" what the characters in the original film were all about, which made it a true comedy classic, they still pulled off funny performances which made for good if not outstanding comedy.
