All the films presented here will have as a common denominator, a link to video games. Be it a mere adaptation, or a film which reflects on the video game media. Men, women, children: welcome to Crossed.
Crossed is a French Web Video series hosted by Karim Debbache, that ran from February 2013 to April 2014. The topic is simple: films that are either adapted from video games, or are about video games. They can be old or not so old, bad, good or okay, but Karim has a lot of things to say on every one of them, and only 10-15 minutes to say them. While the tone is humoristic and often sarcastic, it is usually peppered with detailed analyses of what did and did not work in said film, as well as comments on its (or its director's) history, or on cinematic techniques in general.
Little sketches often intervene, featuring his two sidekicks Gilles Stella (the show's image and sound manager) and Jérémy Morvan, or Kamel Debbiche, a double of him who is implied to be his second personalitynote . The show is pretty fast-paced, and often draws its humour from it. Crossed's run wasn't very long, as Karim hadn't planned on making more than 25-30 episodes, to avoid a situation where he would have always been repeating the same things after a while.
However, in January of 2016, Karim and his friends started a new show, Chroma, that can be considered a Spiritual Successor to Crossed minus the video game topic, with longer episodes and the analytical aspect pushed further.
If you're curious but don't speak French, here's the first episode
subtitled in English.
Not to be confused with the Garth Ennis comic series.
Movies reviewed in Crossed:
- Super Mario Bros. (1993)
- G@mer (a French film featuring Saïd Taghmaoui)
- Silent Hill
- The King of Kong
- House of the Dead
- The Last Starfighter
- Max Payne
- Stay Alive (2006)
- Future Cops
- Alone in the Dark
- WarGames
- Double Dragon (1994)
- Doom
- Street Fighter
- eXistenZ
- Postal (2007)
- The Lawnmower Man — known as Le Cobaye ("the Guinea Pig") in France
- Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
- Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
- Brainscan
- Resident Evil (2002)
- DOA: Dead or Alive
- The other Gamer movie ("Ultimate Game" in France)
- Hitman
- Ra.One ("Voltage" in France)
- The Wizard
- TRON
- Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Tropes found in Crossed
- All Asians Know Martial Arts: Karim mentions it very-briefly during his hyper-fast enumeration of the graveyard fight scene's flaws in House Of The Dead (where the Asian girl uses her martial art skills), noting this trope is actually awfully racist. Similarly, in his review of Ra.One, he awkwardly points out that the movie's sole Chinese character is the one who knows martial arts the best.
- All Just a Dream: At the end of the Postal review, Karim wakes up, realizes that it was just a nightmare, and immediately lampshades how predictable this is. Then he realizes the sphinx he drew in his dream is real, and points out this is very hackneyed too.
- Antagonist Title: In the Ra.One episode, he mentions that the original title is the name of the movie's villain. But it has been changed in the French version, which is known as "Voltage" in France (which is the altered name of the hero).
- Arch-Enemy: Karim regards Uwe Boll as his, as he reviewed three of his movies and condemns his despicable behavior in his review of Postal.
- Audience Surrogate: Kamel often plays this role.
- Bad "Bad Acting": Kamel very unconvincingly pretends to care when Karim explains why he likes Jean-Claude Van Damme.
- Bald Head of Toughness: Jérémy, who is bald, certainly thinks so and in a skit at the end of the Hitman review, he encourages more people to become bald.
- Berserk Button: Downplayed, Gilles harmlessly slaps anyone who dares speak ill of Steven Spielberg.
- Brick Joke:
- At the beginning of the review of G@mer, Karim notes that the director Patrick Lévy changed his name to "Zak Fishman" for this film, and wonders if he should take a cool sounding English name himself. The end credits of the episode feature him as "Superman Rockfeller".
- At the start of his The Lawnmower Man review, Kamel mentions that he always thought control over wood would be a better superpower than Magnetism Manipulation. At the end of the review Karim throws a tree at Kamel, admitting that it is useful.
- The Cameo: The episode focused on the Doom movie contains 2 scenes with Antoine Daniel.
- Christmas Episode: The Dead or Alive episode. Karim says he couldn't find a Christmas movie about video games, so he decided to give some Fanservice to his audience for Christmas instead.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Jérémy. For instance, when the team finds an apparently dead man in the House of the Dead episode, Jérémy decides to check whether he's really dead by throwing him out of the window, arguing that "if he falls, it means he's dead, if he flies... he's a witch!".
- Cool and Unusual Punishment: Karim once warns Kamel that if he insults him once more, he will turn him into Jérémy Morvan eating a sandwich. It's not an empty threat either.
- Corpsing:
- Karim is visibly trying very hard not to laugh when Jérémy does his impression of a machine gun in the review of Gamer. In an outtake after the end credits, he can't take it anymore and cracks up.
- In-Universe, Karim mentions he has to bite the inside of his cheek to avoid laughing when he sees Dumont's design in Tron.
- Curse Cut Short: Twice in the Brainscan review:
- First, when Gilles describes the Club Dial (a French company that infamously sold CDs for cheap at first then forced subscribers to buy more for outrageous prices), he concludes that "life is a bit-".
- Second, when Karim mentions he hates the protagonist:Karim: So the whole time, I was rooting for the cops!
Kamel: That's funny!
Karim: Why is that?
Kamel: Well because you're an ara-
- Department of Redundancy Department: In the Silent Hill review, every sequence taking place in the real world starts with "Meanwhile, in the true real world of actual reality..."
- Designated Hero: In-Universe, Karim explains in the Brainscan review that he views the main protagonist as a teen Jerkass deprived of any redeemed quality, partially explaining why he despises this movie.
- Détournement: Karim often parodies scenes from the reviewed films by replacing the dialogue with his own jokes.
- Driven to Suicide:
- House of the Dead is so bad that the previous owner of the copy Karim watches strangled himself to death in despair. Then Played for Laughs when Karim also tries after watching the film but stops after Gilles tells him he's acting like Marion Cotillard.
- Played for laughs again when Kamel hangs himself when Karim tells him he's about to review Double Dragon. He's fine immediately afterwards.
- Excuse Plot: While a few of the movies reviewed have this, Karim notes that Mortal Kombat Annihilation goes beyond that point by not having a plot at all and being basically just a succession of random fights.
- Fanservice: While he criticizes its use in the Dead or Alive movie, he admits that the games are also guilty of this, and since the review is a Christmas Episode, he decides to gift his audience with some himself by putting pictures of attractive models in the end credits.
- Former Child Star: Discussed in the review of Brainscan, where Karim tells the story of how Edward Furlong's career collapsed, he also mentions Corey Feldman's.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: Some of the latest episodes have a long subliminal message that appears for a split-second and is always hilarious to read if you pause at the right moment.
- Gag Censor:
- The face of Charles, a friend of Karim, is used as a Censor Box in the eXistenZ review.
- Pictures of the French politician Alain Madelin are used for the same purpose in the Postal review... but the pictures themselves are censored with pictures of hamsters.
- Happy Ending: Fittingly discussed in the final episode.
- I Take Offense to That Last One: In the G@mer review, when Kamel calls him out for lying when it seems like the film has nothing to do with video games.Kamel: Do you mean you're an asshole who doesn't keep his promises?
Karim: Of course not, young viewer, I'm an asshole who does keep his promises! - In Name Only: A few of the adaptations he reviews, obviously (beginning with Super Mario Bros), but this is usually not his main complaint − but rather the fact that these films still try to throw winks and references to the original game despite having little connection to them. He actually liked The Spirits Within for not trying to do that.
- Intentional Engrish for Funny: In the Street Fighter review, Karim is so upset when a scene involves Jean-Claude Van Damme of all people stop a fight that he addresses the film's director about it, but then realizes he might not speak French, so he writes the following message in awful English:Good, mister realisator of film, if you not talk français, contacting me, I send copy to you of "C'est bien, yes mister", one booking of learn of French thong specialitely concepted for the "anglophones" tail I wrote there is some years.
- Jump Scare: In the Resident Evil episode, Karim complains that the horrific part of the movie is so bad that the moviemaker added this trope everywhere to compensate. The episode features a couple of parodic jump scares with a smiling Jérémy appearing while quietly saying "Booh".
- Killed Mid-Sentence: Played for laughs in a Cutaway Gag in the Alone in the Dark review, where Karim and Gilles mock the scene where Burke stupidly dies by only setting a 5-second timer on a bomb:Karim: Okay, Gilles, I have set set up the explosives and we have got not less than five seconds to ru—BOOM!
- Malicious Misnaming: When Karim fears he's mispronouncing Anubhav Sinha's name in the review of Ra.One, Kamel decides to misname Karim for the rest of the review to compensate.
- Massive Multiplayer Crossover: In the Street Fighter episode, he says that about half of the characters are useless and only there for Pandering to the Base. He then adds that he could make movies himself with this recipe, then shows a short (barely) animated sequence featuring Son Goku, Slash, Totoro, Batman, Freddy Krueger, and ET, hanging out in the street before being arrested by Harry Callahan.
- Musicalis Interruptus: The music often stops in the middle of an explanation of the movie's plot, just the time for Karim to insert a sarcastic remark, before starting again.
- N-Word Privileges: In the Brainscan review, Kamel calls Karim a "bougnoule", which is a derogatory term for people of Arabic descent in France.
- Noodle Incident:
- In the review of Alone in the Dark, Karim claims to be a Vietnam veteran. When Gilles accuses him of lying, he answers "there are many things you don't know about me, Gilles".
- In the review of Hitman, Jérémy claims without elaborating that he's bald because of the "radiation".
- Not Screened for Critics: Discussed in the review of Dead or Alive, an instance of this trope.
- Obligatory Joke: Karim has to angrily order Kamel to stop singing Stayin' Alive during the review of Stay Alive. After Karim leaves at the end of the episode, Gilles starts dancing to the song.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Played for laughs when Karim mentions that before he finally got to see the monster in Doom, he had enough time to save North Korea twice.
- Once Original, Now Common: Invoked, while he admits that the faces in The Spirits Within often go in the Unintentional Uncanny Valley, he still wants to remind us that the movie was technically way ahead of its time.
- Police Are Useless: The emotionless cop who appears in many episodes is usually only there to ask people for their papers for no reason rather than doing anything helpful.
- The Prima Donna: The fake behind-the-scenes segments of the King of Kong episode depict Karim as one.
- Product Placement: Discussed in the review of The Wizard, and even parodied when Karim becomes so fed up with all the product placement in the latter movie that he starts adding ads for his show and his nonexistent coffee brand to the episode.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: The late part of the Doom episode has Camille Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre as a musical background.
- Questionable Casting:
- In-Universe, during the Alone In The Dark review, it is how Karim reacts to Tara Reid being the archaeologist Aline Cedrac.
- He has the same reaction to Arielle Dombasle's casting as a game designer in G@mer.
- This is also how he reacted to Christopher Lambert not reprising his role as Raiden in Mortal Kombat Annihilation. Because Lambert was working on Beowulf (1999), probably the worst film of his career.
- Recycled In Space: The review of Postal is literally in space, Uwe Boll sends Karim and Gilles there for no reason at all to review the film.
- Running Gag
- In the Mortal Kombat Annihilation review:
Karim: When suddenly…
Kamel: Brawl!
Karim: Brawl, yes, but [laconic description of the fight]- Gilles is a big fan of Jurassic Park (1993), and will bring it up at every opportunity. Karim is also a fan and often brings up how many years before or after it a movie with bad CGI was released. Some episodes contain a Subverted Punchline where Karim sounds like he's going to compare the reviewed film to Jurassic Park again then picks another instead, for instance he mentions The Lawnmower Man came out in 1992, one year... after Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
- Karim calls special forces in movies "lones" since the review of Alone in the Dark and him sarcastically explaining to his French audience that the film is true to his title since "alone in the dark" translates as "lots of cops fighting monsters" in French.
- Kamel often gets the names of the film directors wrong, for instance he confuses Orson Welles with H. G. Wells. In one case, Karim is the one who gets the name wrong when he confuses Resident Evil's director Paul W.S. Anderson with Paul Thomas Anderson, but he blatantly does it on purpose to introduce the audience to the latter, whom he admires much more than the former. At the end of the review, he also confuses him with Wes Anderson.
- "Shaggy Frog" Story: Kamel tells Karim a nonsensical story about how thylacines became extinct to aggressively remind him to review Hitman.
- Shoot the Money: Discussed in the review of Doom, where Karim explains what a "money shot" is.
- Shout-Out:
- In the first episode, Karim greets his audience with "okay, campers, rise and shine".
- In the review of Starfighter, during a scene involving a Flying Car, Karim quips that where they're going, they don't need roads.
- The opening of the review of Ra.One references the song Voyage, voyage by the French singer Desireless. Similarly, the opening of the review of Doom references the song Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!! by Vengaboys, and the opening of the review of eXistenZ references the song Résiste by the French singer France Gall. In the latter review, he also references the song Et Vice Versa by Les Inconnus.
- In the review of The Lawnmower Man, when Karim explains why he chose to review it, he says "I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood. Something that could never, ever possibly destroy us... and it just popped in there".
- The opening of the review of G@mer is a homage to The Twilight Zone (1959).
- The fake behind-the-scenes segments of the review of King of Kong are a homage to The Office (US).
- Karim mocks a fight scene in Future Cops by playing Yakety Sax during it.
- To mock the constant Product Placement in The Wizard, Karim puts sunglasses on and announces the episode will switch to "Roddy Piper-vision", a shot where the Power Glove is replaced with the word "BUY" follows.
- Karim starts a metronome before he starts watching House of the Dead in his bed, a reference to Se7en.
- When the first glimpse of the strange creatures in Max Payne appears, Karim "enhances" the picture to take a better look at it just like Deckard does in Blade Runner.
- Show, Don't Tell: Karim has to remind this after seeing the ridiculous Wall of Text at the beginning of Alone in the Dark.
- Show Within a Show:
- In the Future Cops review, Karim turns Kamel into Jérémy, but at the end, Kamel reappears and Karim asks him what happened to Jérémy, Kamel answers he's in "a better world". It turns out that he left to star in a fictional film titled A Better World and the episode ends with a fake trailer of it.
- The film is mentioned again in the newspapers in the review of Doom, which mention that it received critical acclaim.
- So Bad, It's Good: What he thinks of Future Cops, Mortal Kombat Annihilation and House of the Dead. At the end of the latter's review, he even throws a long monologue about what this kind of film can bring to us.
- Song Parody: A few, most notably in the review of Max Payne, which ends with a list of films better than the latter sung to the tune of "Turkey in the Straw"
- Sophisticated as Hell: While he usually keeps a polished speech, he's not above dropping a Precision F-Strike here and there.
- Spoiler: The reviews usually have a summary of the whole plot, including the ending. When this is a film about videogame which has a twist ending, he precedes said spoiler by a warning screen advising the viewer to stop the video here if they want to watch the movie and discover the ending by themselves.
- Averted in the Ra.One episode. He stops the plot's summary in the middle of the review after stating that the movie is basically a Terminator 2 rip-off, and that describing it any longer would just spoil the latter movie.
- Stylistic Suck: The first scene of Gamer is told with hilarious sound effects Jérémy makes with his mouth.
- Talking to Themself: The show treats the gags where Karim talks to Kamel as this, although this is contradicted in Chroma, which establishes that Kamel is actually Karim's Alternate Self from an Alternate Universe.
- Take That!: Played for laughs in the quick summary of Mortal Kombat: The Movie.Karim: So Liu Kang kicks Shang Tsung's ass because it's not very nice to kill people's brothers, is it, Mr. Henry Fonda?
- Toilet Humor: Mocked in the review of House Of The Dead, where he cheers with his friends at each element of the sacred trinity - a puke joke, a pee joke, and a crap joke.
- Tropaholics Anonymous: The review of Gamer starts with Karim solemnly declaring that he has a problem he wants to talk about... he likes Crank. Then Jérémy starts talking about his drinking problem but Karim stops him with "it was a joke, dude, it's not an actual meeting."
- Video Game Movies Suck: The show's whole point is to study why.
- What, Exactly, Is His Job?: In the King of Kong review, nobody knows why Jérémy is in the team, not even him.
- What the Hell Is That Accent?: Lampshaded, Gilles's bad Uwe Boll impression in the Postal episode introduces himself as "Uwe Boll with a racist accent".
- Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Discussed at length in the review of Brainscan, a film where this doesn't work since the game's rules are very inconsistent.
- You Keep Using That Word: In the Dead Or Alive review, Karim points out that the characters constantly use "shinobi" with the meaning of "traitor", while it is in fact just a synonym of "Ninja".
- You Might Remember Me from...: When Jérémy introduces himself at the end of the Hitman review, he mentions the audience might have seen him in La Demeure, which is an actual short film he was in.
