The pages of a Mortadelo and Filemon comic book are packed with detail, verbal wit, and visual invention, and on screen this translates into a hyperactivity and breathlessness which is at times almost exhausting: it’s the kind of viewing experience designed to deliver new visual pleasures on a second viewing as the viewer refocuses on the background. Professor Bacterio (all characters are visually faithful recreations of the originals) has invented a serum called Reversicine, intended to transform Mortadelo and Filemon into intelligent beings, but Tronchamulas is accidentally injected with it, whereon he becomes gentle and baby-like, also revealing that he is Jimmy’s cousin.

Further bad news arrives in the form of the monstrous Tronchamulas ( Victor Monigote), a violent, three-ton criminal who wishes to take revenge on Filemon by doing a terrible, nameless “something” to him. When Jimmy steals a safe from the TIA (not CIA) building, the Superintendent ( Mariano Venancio) instructs our heroes to recover it. Brainless, but an expert in disguise, Mortadelo ( Karra Elejalde) and his temperamental boss work for a criminal investigation agency, under threat from a dastardly Marty Feldman lookalike called “Jimmy el Cachondo” ( Gabriel Chame), loosely translatable as “Jimmy the Joker”. We’re returned to the ramshackle, comically violent, malfunctioning gadget-filled world they normally inhabit, something like a mash-up between Looney Tunes and Wallace and Gromit.

Early scenes portray an entertainingly hi-tech, glossy variation on classic M & F slapstick motifs before it’s revealed that it’s all been a dream by Filemon ( Janfri Topera).

Mortadelo y filemon pelicula