JUST VISITING is one very funny fish-out-of-water comedy the whole family will enjoy. It's 12th century France and Count Thibault of Malfete (Jean Reno, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE) finds his beautiful bride-to-be (Christina Applegate, TV's JESSE) done in by malevolent magic. So he and his loyal servant Andre (Christian Clavier, LES VISITEURS) request the help of a local wizard to right the wrong and bring his beloved back. But the wizardry goes awry and the pair is transported to 21st century Chicago where they meet Thibault's descendant Julia (Applegate) and her scheming fiance. With their timeless values of honor and courage, they wreak hilarious havoc as they foil diabolical plots in modern-day Chicago and try to find their way back home.

Actors Jean Reno and Christian Clavier, along with director Jean-Marie Poiré, were the creative team behind The Visitors, a French comedy from the early 1990s that was a massive hit in its native land and a cult favorite in America. Enthusiastically compared by some to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Visitors concerns a time-traveling, medieval knight and his lowly servant, both lost in the 20th century and both shocked by the discovery of their descendants' reversal of fortunes. The film works not only as a nutty bit of slapstick, but as a cheeky satire about class conflict. The Visitors deserves its admirers, but it doesn't deserve Just Visiting, an oddly inappropriate remake featuring the same cast and director, all of whom are undercut by an annoyingly sentimental spin on the original story. This time, Reno and Clavier inexplicably end up in a modern-day U.S. instead of France, and the lure of freedom for Clavier's downtrodden character is tied up not in economics but in his attachment to a fetching neighbor. Blame cowriter John Hughes (Home Alone) for turning something that was once sharp into something dull and sticky. With Christina Applegate, Malcolm McDowell. --Tom Keogh