Crossed is a French Web Video series hosted by Karim Debbache and produced for the website Jeuxvideo.com that ran from February 2013 to April 2014. The topic is simple: films that are either adapted from video games, or about video games.
The movies 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 (2005)
- WarGames
- Double Dragon (1994)
- Doom (2005)
- Street Fighter (1994)
- eXistenZ
- Postal (2007)
- The Lawnmower Man — known as Le Cobaye ("the Guinea Pig") in France
- Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within — known as Final Fantasy: Les Créatures de l'esprit ("The Creatures of the Mind") in France
- Mortal Kombat: Annihilation — known as Mortal Kombat: Destruction finale ("Final Destruction") in France
- Brainscan
- Resident Evil (2002)
- DOA: Dead or Alive
- The other Gamer movie — known as Ultimate Game in France
- Hitman
- Ra.One — known as Voltage in France
- The Wizard — known as Vidéokid: L'Enfant génial ("Videokid: The Child Genius") in France
- TRON
- Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Tropes found in Crossed
- Accidental Aesop: In The Last Starfighter, Alex survives the attack on the Star League's base because he chickens out, refuses to join the league and leaves the base before the attack. Karim points this out and thanks Hollywood for teaching children that cowardice works.
- Actor Allusion: Many, for instance Karim calls Ian Holm's character in eXistenZ "Bilbo the Hungarian".
- 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.
- Allegedly Optimistic Ending: Karim mentions that many instances of Happy Ending aren't actually very happy if you think about it, audiences are just willing to accept them as happy as long as the good guys win.
- Aluminum Christmas Trees: In-Universe, Kamel is baffled to learn that there used to be a porn capital of the world. San Fernando Valley
indeed had this reputation from the 1970s to the 2000s. - Antagonist Title: In the Ra.One episode, Karim 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).
- Anything but That!: Karim heavily criticizes Arielle Dombasle being horribly miscast as a game designer in G@mer and repeatedly begs for anyone but her to play the game designer in eXistenZ. Fortunately, the latter turns out to be played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.
- 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.
- As Himself: Played for Laughs in the brief segment in which Gilles explains a factoid about The Simpsons in the review of Ra.One, which ends with credits stating "with Gilles Stella as Gilles Stella".
- Audience Surrogate: Kamel often plays this role.
- The Auteur Theory:
- Karim explains this theory to justify why he doesn't just recommend eXistenZ: he recommends David Cronenberg as a whole.
- Played for laughs after Karim finishes reviewing Tron: Kamel suggests he take a look at Steven Lisberger's first film to find patterns that could help him interpret Tron's point... but the film turns out to be Animalympics, leading Karim to conclude that critics are sometimes trying too hard to find meaning in films.
- Bad "Bad Acting":
- Kamel very unconvincingly pretends to care when Karim explains why he likes Jean-Claude Van Damme.
- At the end of the review of eXistenZ, Karim and Gilles make a commercial for Charles's censoring business in which they play themselves terribly.
- Bait-and-Switch: When Karim starts reviewing DOA: Dead or Alive, Kamel points out that Karim will definitely use this review as an excuse to tell his audience about Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive and the rest of his filmography... Karim doesn't, because Kamel just did it for him.
- 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:
- Karim doesn't tolerate anyone besmirching Jean-Claude Van Damme.
- Downplayed, Gilles harmlessly slaps anyone who dares speak ill of Steven Spielberg.
- Big "SHUT UP!": Karim throws several in a row at Kamel when he keeps singing Stayin' Alive every time Karim says the title of Stay Alive.
- Black Comedy: Karim points out that we have no idea who the girl Jimmy beats during the tournament at the end of The Wizard is, and quips that the tournament might have been her last hope and that after losing it, the only option she has left might be suicide.
- Black Comedy Animal Cruelty: Karim hates the gratuitous musical number in Ra.One so much he claims it makes him want to gut lionhead rabbits.
- Bland-Name Product: Karim calls Annihilation's takes on Outworld and Shinnok knockoffs of Mordor and Palpatine respectively and promptly nicknames them "Mordux" and "Palpatox".
- Bond Villain Stupidity: Karim calls this the "Wild Wild West syndrome" and is quite annoyed to see such a Discredited Trope played completely straight several times in Gamer, an otherwise serious, 2009 film.
- Bowdlerise: Karim criticizes the fact that many scenes of Max Payne are censored in order to avoid an R rating, because it results in atrocious editing even in the so-called uncensored version and betrays the original game.
- Brain Bleach:
- After Karim mocks the miscasting of Mila Kunis as a hitwoman in Max Payne and suggest other miscasting ideas such as the Care Bears as the Manson Family, Kamel calls them Nightmare Fuel and begs him to stop.
- Kamel has the same reaction again later in the same episode when he sees the horribly filmed climax.
- 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.
- When eXistenZ starts involving Recursive Reality, Karim sounds like he's about to compare it to Inception, but instead compares it to La Vache qui rit, a French brand of cheese known for the Droste Image in its logo. In the Annihilation episode, when Kamel suggests making a Show Within a Show to recap the first Mortal Kombat film, he sounds like he's about to compare his idea to Inception, but Karim cuts him off with another reference to La Vache qui rit.
- After Karim reviews Tron, Kamel asks him "you know what you should do?" and Karim promptly answers "rap!" before Kamel clarifies he meant analyzing the film through the lens of The Auteur Theory. A few moments later, when the credits starts rolling, Karim raps in the background.
- Broken Record: Some scenes in Postal are so gross they damage Karim's brain and cause his sentences to become stuck on a loop.Karim: Sorry, I think this shot just blasted to pieces a very important area of my brain. Of my brain. Of my brain.
- California Doubling: Karim knows Paris very well and immediately notices that the scene in Hitman which is supposed to happen in a train station in Saint Petersburg was actually filmed in the Gare Montparnasse
. - The Cameo:
- The episode focused on the Doom movie contains 2 scenes with Antoine Daniel.
- Other French YouTubers make short cameos in a couple episodes, for instance Usul and Dorian from 3615 Usul (another show Karim worked on) can be spotted at the end of the review of The Last Starfighter.
- Captain Obvious:
- Professor Sédétruk, who sometimes appears to tell the audience about supposedly obscure facts about the reviewed films, tends to instead talk about blatantly obvious stuff, for instance he mentions that the foes exploding into coins when defeated in Scott Pilgrim is a video game reference, as if he assumed the audience doesn't know what Scoring Points means.
- At the end of the review of Doom, Karim's friends try to come up with new Taglines for various films. The only thing Jérémy can come up with for Jaws 1 is "no swimming allowed on account of sharks".
- Censored for Comedy:
- Karim mentions that he hates it when someone jokes that Mario's universe makes no sense and that it makes him want to beat them up with a "[beep]key wrench", even though the French word for "monkey wrench", clé à molette, is completely innocuous.
- Karim mocks the gratuitous scene in Postal where children are shot dead during a gunfight by putting dead children all over the screen to show he can do it too, but all the pictures are completely censored... except one of Casper.
- Child Supplants Parent: Karim points out that Prateek's dreams in Ra.One, in which he has the appearance of his father and the Damsel in Distress he rescues has the appearance of his mother, are disturbingly reminiscent of the Oedipus Complex.
- 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.
- Chromosome Casting: There are no female characters in the show, the King of Kong episode shows that all of Karim's co-workers are men.
- Cliché Storm:
- There are so many clichés in The Last Starfighter that Karim humorously lists the most blatant ones, for instance he sarcastically calls Centauri "Obi-Wan" then "Dumbledore" then "Gandalf". He then analyzes why the film contains so many clichés by discussing the monomyth.
- Karim isn't pleased with Stay Alive's complete lack of originality. Even though it came out a decade after Scream (1996), it's nothing but a rehash of every pre-Scream trite Slasher Movie.
- The biggest criticism he has against The Spirits Within is that the plot is entirely predictable and the characters completely straight archetypes.
- 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!".
- Cluster F-Bomb: Played for laughs in the FAQ episode, where Karim is asked whether he actually swears when not in character and he answers "it's the way I fucking fucking talk, fuck".
- Comical Overreacting: After Gilles and Jérémy mock Double Dragon's fights in a scene where they look like they're about to fight but Gilles instead playfully pinches Jérémy's cheeks as if he was a baby, Jérémy sounds traumatized and confides on a Freudian Couch that he felt the gag went too far.
- Comically Missing the Point:
- When Karim mentions Xavier Gens directed Hitman, he adds "cock-a-doodle-doo!" since Gens is French. Kamel misunderstands and thinks Gens is a chicken.
- In the FAQ episode, when a viewer asks about "the future" (as in the team's future projects), Jérémy starts sharing his theories about the evolution of the price of oil.
- In the review of The Wizard, Karim explains what Product Placement is by suddenly showing an M&M to Kamel to get him to notice it. Kamel insults him when he realizes he fell for it, and when Karim clarifies that he wasn't actually paid, Kamel insults him again... for being terrible at business.
- Completely Different Title:
- Karim hates it when it happens without a justification and criticizes it several times, most notably in the review of Ra.One, because the French title Voltage is the exact opposite of what the filmmakers intended and comes off as an insult to them and the audience's intelligence.
- He also states that basically every country gave The Wizard a totally unrecognizable title (or even several) such as Joy Stick Heroes in Germany or Sweet Road in Japan, so he decides to make up his own, Video Game Kid Hero Boy 3.
- 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: In-Universe, Karim mentions he has to bite the inside of his cheek to avoid laughing when he sees Dumont's design in Tron.
- Cringe Comedy: Used in the fake behind-the-scenes segments of the King of Kong episode, since they reference The Office (US). For instance, there's a gag where Jérémy suddenly starts singing and playing his guitar while everyone else is working, his friends give him a Collective Death Glare, he hesitates... then carries on.
- 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-
- Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Karim mocks the Red Queen's unnecessary cruelty in Resident Evil by showing HAL 9000 threaten Dave to eat his dog, set his living room on fire, clamp his nipples and piss in his hair.
- Damned by Faint Praise: While reviewing G@mer, Karim introduces Saïd Taghmaoui as an actor he kinda liked before he watched G@mer... then just introduces Bruno Salomone as "an actor".
- 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 redeeming qualities, partially explaining why he despises this movie.
- Similarly, he feels that Hitman completely fails to humanize 47. While his awkward moments with Nika are supposed to do so, he points out that they don't compensate for 47's cruelty throughout the film.
- He also hates Prateek in Ra.One for framing other kids for his pranks and especially for basically forgetting his father died to protect him from Ra.One and instead regarding G.One as his new father.
- Designated Villain: Karim criticizes The Wizard for writing the Bounty Hunter trying to find the runaway child protagonists as a despicable jerk even though his goal isn't nefarious, as if the film's writers just felt they were missing a villain. Furthermore, he points out that while the film does introduce the audience to Lucas, the other gamer Jimmy faces during the tournament is never introduced, so she's only considered a foe because the plot says so.
- Deus ex Machina: Defined and discussed in the Scott Pilgrim episode.
- Didn't We Use This Joke Already?: In the review of Postal, Karim is about to use Charles as a living Censor Box but then remembers and points out that he already did it in the review of eXistenZ, so he instead uses pictures of the French politician Alain Madelin... censored with pictures of hamsters.
- Do Not Do This Cool Thing : Karim feels that Gamer's criticism of the trivialization of violence and lewdness is strongly undermined by the way it's shot, which instead appears to glorify the very things it's supposed to warn against.
- 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.
- E = MC Hammer: In the opening of the Silent Hill episode, Karim can't choose which film to review, so Gilles writes a nonsensical equation to calculate which one he should pick.
- Early Installment Character-Design Difference: Karim and Kamel wear identical outfits, unlike in Chroma, where their sweatshirts have subtle differences that make them easier to tell apart. They also wear sleeveless shirts in some episodes, whereas in Chroma, they wear their sweatshirts in every single episode .
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- The most notable instance is that Karim and Kamel are a single individual with a Split Personality, whereas in Chroma, they're separate people from Alternate Universes. Furthermore, Karim is always the host, Kamel is just his Sidekick. Kamel's personality is also quite different, as he's shown to be less knowledgeable about filmmaking than in Chroma, argues with Karim more often and tends to behave as The Ditz like Jérémy.
- Kamel was unnamed until the FAQ episode.
- Gilles isn't the cameraman and Jérémy isn't the sound engineer, unlike in Chroma. They also comparatively rarely interact with Karim and Kamel directly.
- Evil Is Hammy: In the eXistenZ episode, Karim mentions that whenever Willem Dafoe overacts, his character is definitely a villain.
- Excuse Plot: While a few of the movies reviewed have this, Karim notes that Annihilation goes beyond that point by not having a plot at all and being basically just a succession of random fights.
- Fanboy:
- Gilles is so obsessed with Jurassic Park that he can re-enact entire scenes from memory while doing impressions of the characters. He eventually writes a song inspired by the film, which makes him famous.
- Karim is a fan of Jean-Claude Van Damme, doesn't let anyone speak ill of him and spends quite a lot of time defending him in the review of Street Fighter.
- Fanservice: While Karim 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.
- Fetishes Are Weird: Karim is shocked to see a character in Stay Alive be called a pervert for accidentally stumbling upon his housemate having sex with his girlfriend... even though the housemate is doing it wearing a Sackhead Slasher mask.Karim: Pervert!? He is the pervert!?
- Focal Length: Discussed in the Doom review, where Karim explains to his audience how important it is to use the right length for the right scene.
- Foreign Language Title: The show is French but its title is an English word referring to the fact that the show's concept involves films crossed with video games.
- Forgetful Jones: Exaggerated: Kamel forgets what a first name is in the Brainscan episode, and in the Hitman episode, he forgets the existence of Crossed, then also forgets what a show even is.
- 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.Karim: Time is a motherfucker.
- Formula-Breaking Episode:
- The King of Kong episode, in addition to its unique fake behind-the-scenes skits, is the only episode where the reviewed film is a documentary.
- The Postal episode is the only one not set in the show's usual scenery because Uwe Boll teleports Karim into space, which Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: Some 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.
- Fun with Acronyms:
- Karim nicknames the cultists' witch burning ceremony in Silent Hill the KKKK: Ku Klux Klan Kebab.
- The segment in which Karim explains techniques relying on focal length while reviewing Doom is titled DUTDMESAKDESQMDLJELBH, which stands for Découvrez une technique de mise en scène avec Karim Debbache en seulement quelques minutes, dans la joie et la bonne humeurnote .
- 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.
- Gag Dub:
- Karim often parodies scenes from the reviewed films by replacing the dialogue with his own jokes.
- The dialogues from Ra.One make so little sense at times that Karim claims the film is already a gag dub.
- Gratuitous English: Karim criticizes the French dub of Ra.One for renaming G.One Voltage (pronounced the English way) for no reason, since the dub doesn't even have the excuse of going with a name more pronounceable or familiar to French speakers.
- Happy Ending: Fittingly discussed in the final episode, although Karim admits that for Scott Pilgrim, it was more like a Bittersweet Ending in that it failed to make a profit but became a Cult Classic. The show itself happily ends with Karim glad to have reviewed a good movie for the finale and thanking his audience for their support.
- Hard-to-Adapt Work:
- Karim explains that the universe of Super Mario Bros isn't inherently nonsensical as commonly claimed, it makes perfect sense in a video game, what makes it nonsensical is to try to adapt it, which is why the film is a mess.
- While Karim agrees that The Spirits Within isn't a faithful Final Fantasy film adaptation, he points out that making one is impossible since the games' plots are dozens of hours long, blend elements from many genres and feature enormous casts.
- The Hero's Journey: Discussed in the review of The Last Starfighter, a film that follows this trope to a T.
- Hidden Depths:
- For all his silliness, Jérémy is shown several times to be able to play the guitar.
- Karim mentions in the review of The Lawnmower Man that macramé is a passion of his.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: Karim likes pointing out instances of this trope (which he calls "funny coincidence that might not be one") related to the films he reviews. For instance, he mentions that WarGames wouldn't be the last time a main character played by Matthew Broderick would hack his school's computers since it also happens in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
- Hypocritical Humor:
- In the WarGames episode, when an officer mocks the idea of entrusting a machine with a country's safety, Karim says nobody would be dumb enough to do that... while simultaneously using a smartphone and a tablet computer.
- In the Alone in the Dark episode, when Karim notices the cops' body armor is actually paintball equipment, he calls it the most primitive cop outfit he has ever seen, only for a cop in an even more primitive outfit to appear out of nowhere and ask for his papers.
- In the Scott Pilgrim episode, Karim calls the Evil Twin trope a little tired, and his identical Doppelgänger Kamel agrees.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: At the end of the review of Stay Alive, Karim states he's going to get drunk to forget.
- I Take Offense to That Last One: In the G@mer review, when Kamel calls Karim 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! - Idiot Plot: Karim criticizes this in several films he reviews, such as House of the Dead, where the main characters are being hunted by zombies and decide to find shelter in a graveyard.
- Immediate Self-Contradiction: In the FAQ episode, after Karim gives a bunch of one-word answers in a row, Kamel asks him whether he's going to answer every question with one word. Karim answers "no".
- Impossibly Tacky Clothes: The review of Double Dragon mocks the awful costumes the magical medallion gives to its users in a Cutaway Gag where Gilles ends up in an embarrassingly tacky outfit after using the medallion.
- In Name Only:
- Several of the adaptations he reviewed, 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.
- In the review of The Lawnmower Man, Karim tells the infamous true story of how the film was titled after a completely unrelated work by Stephen King, which resulted in King suing to have his name removed.
- Insane Troll Logic: In the Max Payne episode, Kamel confuses the film's director John Moore with Roger Moore, then Demi Moore, then Lova Moor, then the French-Spanish magician Garcimore... then the French comedian Popeck, even though his name sounds nothing like the others'.
- Instantly Proven Wrong: While reviewing Resident Evil, Karim quips that Michelle Rodriguez only ever played one character throughout her career, but adds that at least, she never was in a film made by Uwe Boll... he can't even finish his sentence before he's shown she was in BloodRayne (2005).
- Intentional Engrish for Funny: In the Street Fighter review, Karim is so upset when a scene involves Jean-Claude Van Damme of all people stopping 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.
- Interpol Special Agent: Discussed in the Hitman review, where Kamel points out that there are no such agents in real life while Karim argues that this trope is an Acceptable Break from Reality used to portray Jurisdiction Friction outside America.
- Jump Cut: Karim does a whole bunch of these within seconds when he tells the audience about The Reveal in Resident Evil to mock the film's awful editing.
- Jump Scare:
- Played for laughs in the review of Stay Alive, where Karim is repeatedly scared by the completely nonthreatening sight of Charles holding a cup of coffee.
- 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 not less than five seconds at our disposal to ru—BOOM!
- Know-Nothing Know-It-All:
- Hugo Jouxtel, the show's cinematographer, is depicted as one twice: in the fake behind-the-scenes segments in the King of Kong episode, he's blinded by a light he was tinkering with and appears out of focus in the segments where he films himself, and in the Alone in the Dark review, he gives terrible lighting advice... which happens to be exactly what Uwe Boll went with.
- Jérémy is also shown to be one in the House of the Dead review, where he claims he can examine a seemingly dead man because he's a taxidermist, concludes that the man "self-estrangulated", and to check whether he's actually dead, the only thing he can come up with is to throw him out of a window to see whether he falls.
- In the King of Kong episode, Karim orders Charles to fix everything he finds wrong with the color grading, then finds the result much more pleasing... even though Charles didn't actually fix anything and just left to get more coffee without Karim noticing.
- Lame Pun Reaction: Gilles slaps Kamel after he makes a bad pun in the Ra.One review.
- Literal-Minded: In the Resident Evil episode, when Karim announces he's walking on air, Kamel accuses him of devilry.
- Long List:
- Karim's very fast recap of everything wrong in the big fight scene of House of the Dead:
Karim: The lighting looks like a carnival, you can see the dolly tracks, there's ugly slow motion every 5 seconds, some zombies move around in bell-bottoms, the special effects are crummy, the stunt performers suck, there are fake Bullet Time moments made by having the camera circle the actors while they stand still, the action is confusing, it looks like they run for hours around this fucking well, the Chinese girl does karate moves, it's racist as hell, the image stretches randomly, the makeups are lousy, and there are many, many, many other things done wrong!- Karim ends the review of Max Payne with a list of films he recommends to watch instead (Hard Boiled (1992), Chinatown, Miami Vice, Serpico, Death Sentence, Vertigo, Payback, Memento, RoboCop (1987), Insomnia, Blade Runner, Narc (2002), The Big Sleep, L.A. Confidential (1997), Collateral, Lethal Weapon (1987), Donnie Brasco, Heat, Dredd, Kindergarten Cop, Dirty Harry, Training Day, Cop Land, The Maltese Falcon (1941), Get Carter (1971), Bullitt, The Departed, Death Wish, Die Hard 1, Se7en, Bad Lieutenant, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Man on Fire (2004), The Killer (1989) and The Matrix) which is so long he decides to sing it.
- In the Double Dragon review, during a really confusing fight scene in which lots of random things happen for no reason, Karim starts a list of all the questions he has.
- In the Dead or Alive review, Karim lists the many, many films Corey Yuen was involved in that starred Jet Li and/or Jason Statham.
- Look Behind You: In the Annihilation episode, when Kamel realizes he mistook one of Karim's references for a racist one, he distracts him by shouting "watch out, a drunk leprechaun!" and teleports away. Subverted when it turns out there's actually a drunk leprechaun next to Karim.
- "Magic A" Is "Magic A": Karim criticizes several films he reviews for having inconsistent rules for various things, for instance he points out that Brainscan's plot makes no sense because the game's rules keep changing randomly.
- Malicious Misnaming:
- In the Resident Evil episode, Karim calls Matt an accountant because he finds him more convincing as one than as a cop.
- 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. Karim eventually misnames himself too.
- In the same episode, Karim keeps calling Prateek, a character he despises, petit con ("little prick").
- Manchild:
- Jérémy, in basically every gag involving him. For instance, the moment where Bison asks for a ridiculously high ransom for the hostages he took in Street Fighter is mocked by showing Jérémy childishly asking for 10000 billion dollars.
- Although Gilles is more mature than Jérémy, he gets childish whenever dinosaurs, Steven Spielberg or Steven Spielberg's film with dinosaurs are involved.
- Karim criticizes the characters of Double Dragon for constantly behaving like babies as if the film was written by kids.
- Massive Multiplayer Crossover: In the Street Fighter episode, Karim 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.
- Mexican Standoff: Defined and discussed in the Hitman review.
- Mistaken for Racist: Karim calls Annihilation's Nightwolf "The Indian in the Cupboard", prompting Kamel to call him out on what he thinks is a racist joke. Karim has to clarify that he said that because Nightwolf and Little Bear are actually played by the same actor.
- The Mockbuster: Future Cops qualifies, Kamel calls it a literal "knock-off from Hong Kong", as it blatantly lifts characters from Street Fighter II and Dragon Ball.
- Money-Making Shot: Defined and discussed in the review of Doom.
- Monster Delay: Karim calls this the "rubber band technique" and criticizes its unbearably long use in Doom.
- The Movie Buff: Karim, naturally. When he reviews a bad film, he always knows something better to recommend to his audience.
- 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.
- Mysterious Past: Played for laughs in the review of Alone in the Dark, where 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".
- N-Word Privileges: In the Brainscan review, Kamel calls Karim a "bougnoule", which is a derogatory term for people of Arabic descent in France.
- New Hollywood: Discussed in the review of The Last Starfighter in order to explain how The Blockbuster Age of Hollywood began.
- No Ending: After the review of Gamer, Karim wishes he could talk more about Crank, which he deems a superior video game movie than Gamer, and decides to follow Kamel's advice and do it even though the episode is supposed to be over. Gilles and Jérémy, however, don't want to stay any longer and just leave as soon as he starts, and the episode cuts to the end credits before he can finish saying "hi everyone, it's Karim Debbache for a new episode of...".
- No Fourth Wall: At the end of the review of House of the Dead, Karim's friend Mathias calls him to tell him he found who made the film, but before he can reveal it, the credits start. In the review of Alone in the Dark, he instead writes to Karim and explains that he was unable to reveal the answer to him because they were interrupted by the credits.
- Noodle Incident: In the review of Hitman, Jérémy claims without elaborating that he's bald because of the "radiation".
- Nostalgia Filter: Karim admits this is probably the reason why he likes The Last Starfighter and a few other films he first watched as a kid despite their flaws.
- 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.
- Off-the-Shelf FX:
- The "library" where Mathias finds information about Uwe Boll in the reviews of House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark is actually a kitchen. The team didn't even try to hide it because it was funnier, and the latter episode lampshades it by showing that somehow, Mathias found tomatoes there.
- The machine Karim uses to read Jean-Claude Van Damme's mind in the Street Fighter episode is an intentionally ridiculous example made out of tinfoil, glowsticks and other cheap components.
- 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.
- Oh, Crap!: Karim has this reaction in the Dead or Alive episode when he learns that Paul W. S. Anderson, whose Resident Evil he previously reviewed, was involved in it.
- Old Shame: After Karim reviews The Lawnmower Man, Kamel confronts him with his shameful secret: he bought a Virtual Boy.
- The Other Darrin: In the Annihilation review, Karim calls the replacement of most of the cast of the first Mortal Kombat film a case of "acute Pignonitis", referring to François Pignon, a name Francis Veber often uses for his films' protagonists no matter who plays them.
- Overly Long Gag:
- Pac-Man Fever:
- Criticized in the review of The Wizard, obviously, where Karim promises to gift a brand new Jérémy Morvan to whoever can actually achieve the impossible scores the film depicts.
- Also criticized in the review of Ra.One, in which Karim points out that the video game the film depicts doesn't look remotely like an actual video game as if the filmmakers had never played any, and that it would be terrible if it actually existed, since the artificial intelligence adapting its fighting style to the player's would unbalance everything and the requirement to actually know martial arts to perform moves would make the game unplayable for the average gamer.
- Pandering to the Base: A recurring problem Karim criticizes in many adaptations he reviews. It often results in unnecessary characters, unrealistic action and poor cinematography more focused on making movies look like games (a blatant example being the infamous P.O.V. Cam scene in Doom) than on actually making something interesting to look at. He believes many video game adaptations are failures because their makers failed to consider whether they would work were they not video game adaptations.
- Perfectly Cromulent Word: Karim mocks the bad delivery of a line in the French dub of Annihilation by coining the nonsense word "namépié".
- Person as Verb: In the review of Gamer, Karim calls the sexualization of the avatars of the film's fictional games "Gasparnoization".
- Platonic Cave: In his review of The Lawnmower Man, Karim compares Plato's allegory to the concept of virtual reality games.
- 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.
- Poster-Gallery Bedroom: The show being about cinema and Karim being The Movie Buff, the set unsurprisingly features many film posters.
- Prima Donna Director: The fake behind-the-scenes segments of the King of Kong episode depict Karim as one.
- Product Placement:
- Mocked when the protagonists of Stay Alive defeat the Big Bad by using an Alienware laptop as a mirror with the brand's logo fully visible, prompting Karim to quip "by the power of 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. - The segment hosted by Hugo Jouxtel in the Alone in the Dark review has Aquarium
from the same composer.
- The late part of the Doom episode has Camille Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre
- Punny Name: Professor Sédétruk's name is a pun on sait des trucs, French for "knows things".
- Purely Aesthetic Glasses: Gilles doesn't need glasses but likes wearing Karim's when he does his impression of Ian Malcolm, to Karim's annoyance since he needs them.
- 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 Annihilation. Because Lambert was working on Beowulf (1999), probably the worst film of his career.
- He also claims whoever cast Mila Kunis as a ruthless assassin in Max Payne must have been an alcoholic and then makes suggestions such as casting Macaulay Culkin as Josef Stalin.
- The Quiet One: The only time Charles speaks is in the last episode, where he says "see ya!" to the audience.
- Rapid-Fire Comedy: Karim's fast speech results in this, the time between 2 gags rarely exceeds a minute and it's not rare to have several in a row within seconds.
- Reality Is Unrealistic: Karim mentions that King of Kong's true story is full of stuff you'd find unbelievable in fiction.
- 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
- 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.
- Whenever he mentions Mark Wahlberg, Karim likes bringing up his embarrassing former career as the rapper Marky Mark by playing a clip of him.
- Karim likes thanking directors he likes with the phrase "Mr (untranslatable pun on the director's name), you're a good man".
- In the Annihilation review:
Karim: When suddenly…
Kamel: Brawl!
Karim: Brawl, yes, but [laconic description of the fight]- In the Silent Hill review, Karim keeps calling the scenes with Sean Bean "The Adventures of Boromir".
- After some very violent scenes in the same review, Karim shows some "moments of happiness and carefreedom" he has with his friends to compensate for the episode's bleakness. Similarly, he shows Jérémy clowning around dressed like a "maharaja" after some graphic moments in Gamer.
- Whenever Ludacris appears in Gamer, Karim sings "yeek yeek woop woop!" from Get Back.
- Sarcasm Mode: Frequently, for instance while reviewing Doom, Karim lists Andrzej Bartkowiak's rather mediocre filmography and says gamers always get the cream of the crop of directors.
- Saw "Star Wars" Twenty-Seven Times: In the King of Kong review, it's mentioned that Gilles is believed to have watched Jurassic Park 78 times. It's probably true, as the same episode shows he can perfectly quote entire scenes from memory.
- The Scottish Trope: When Karim mentions that the film known as Ultimate Game in French is titled Gamer in English, Kamel starts pointing out that it's the same title as the previously reviewed G@mer, only for Karim to stop him before he can finish saying "Arielle Dombasle".
- Secret Diary: Before Karim starts reviewing The Spirits Within, Kamel reveals he has been reading his diary and teases him about it.
- "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: Invoked, while Karim 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. He makes similar comments when reviewing other films like Tron that used CGI when it was still rare and groundbreaking no matter how dated it looks now.
- Self-Applied Nickname: Karim calls himself "Captain Cool" in his diary.
- Self-Deprecation:
- The "behind-the-scenes" segments in the King of Kong episode depict Karim as bossy and condescending, Gilles as pathologically obsessed with Jurassic Park, Hugo as a pretentious incompetent, Michou as apathetic and fed up with the others' antics, Charles as more interested in coffee than in his work, and Jérémy as The Load, as no one knows why he's here and all he does is to annoy his colleagues.
- The beginning of the review of The Last Starfighter pokes fun at the aforementioned behind-the-scenes segments, which were negatively received when the episode first aired, when Kamel threatens to beat Karim up if he makes this kind of gag again.
- In the Hitman episode, Kamel describes the show as "exactly like The Nostalgia Critic".
- "Shaggy Frog" Story: Kamel tells Karim a nonsensical story about how thylacines became extinct to aggressively remind him to review Hitman.
- Shout-Out: Practically Once an Episode:
- In the first episode, Karim greets his audience with "okay, campers, rise and shine".
- In the same episode, after mentioning several times that Super Mario Bros came out 2 weeks before Jurassic Park, he plays the "2 weeks" scene from Total Recall (1990).
- The opening of the review of G@mer is a Deliberately Monochrome homage to The Twilight Zone (1959).
- Karim quips that once Sharon reaches Silent Hill, she meets a scarecrow, a lion, a tin man and a wizard, fights a witch and her flying monkeys then returns to Kansas.
- The fake behind-the-scenes segments of the review of King of Kong are a homage to The Office (US).
- In the same episode, the shadow puppetry Karim does is a reference to Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.
- Karim starts a metronome before he starts watching House of the Dead in his bed, a reference to Se7en.
- In the same episode, when the federal agents arrive at the end of the film, he asks whether they have "those things that erase memories" so that he can forget his excruciating experience.
- In the review of The Last Starfighter, during a scene involving a Flying Car, he quips that where they're going, they don't need roads.
- When the first glimpse of the strange creatures in Max Payne appears, he "enhances" the picture to take a better look at it just like Deckard does in Blade Runner.
- The same episode ends with a Long List of films sung as a parody of "Turkey in the Straw" which is almost certainly a homage to "Wakko's America" from Animaniacs.
- He starts the Stay Alive episode by calling Gilles and asking him "do you like scary movies?".
- He mocks a fight scene in Future Cops by playing Yakety Sax during it.
- The same episode starts with Karim asking Gilles the title of the show and Gilles jokingly answering "The Love Boat".
- Still in the same episode, he calls the school bullies "Les Forbans" (the scoundrels), a nod to a French band whose members wear similar outfits.
- He plays Dr Frankenstein's "she's alive!" from Bride of Frankenstein in the Alone in the Dark review when an actress is clearly seen moving after her character was shot dead.
- In the review of WarGames, when David escapes a military base through MacGyvering, Karim plays a clip of MacGyver himself congratulating him.
- He calls a pair of twin characters from Double Dragon the "Chinese Thompson and Thomson".
- The opening of the review of Doom references the song Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!! by Vengaboys.
- In the same episode, he mentions that before he finally saw the monster in the film, he had enough time to build a house of cards then destroy it and calls himself "the Godzilla of cards".
- Still in the same episode, he calls the portal to Mars the "poor man's Stargate".
- The opening of the review of eXistenZ references the song Résiste by the French singer France Gall. In the same review, Karim also references the song Et Vice Versa by Les Inconnus.
- In the review of The Lawnmower Man, when he 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".
- In the same episode, he mocks the title of the film by suggesting The Farmer and the Two Suns, The Fast-Running Dude with a Box of Chocolates, The Teen in a Sleeveless Red Puffer Jacket... and The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe.
- In the review of The Spirits Within, Karim mentions that one of the 8 spirits mankind needs to find to defeat the Phantoms is in a plant, prompting him to parody the scene where Imhotep flees at the sight of a cat in The Mummy (1999) by replacing the cat with lettuce.
- In the same episode, he says "Aki realizes she was actually the fifth element... er, I mean the eighth spirit".
- In the Annihilation episode, Kamel teleports using the same technique as in Dragon Ball Z, complete with the same sound effect.
- In the same episode, Karim calls the film's Shao Kahn "Skeletor" and calls the film itself "the Alien Queen of shitty adaptations".
- In the review of Resident Evil, Karim mocks the Red Queen's toying for no reason with the humans it's programmed to eliminate instead of killing them directly by showing HAL 9000 call it an amateur.
- Karim mentions that a character of Dead or Alive "goes Basic Instinct with cops".
- To explain 47's plan in Hitman, Gilles uses projected pictures tracking his hands' moves, like in Minority Report.
- In the same episode, he calls 47's blowing up the cops trying to break into his hotel room "KevinMcCallisterizing", Nika "the girl with the dragon tattoo" and the Russian president "the Pope of Sanctuary", and he sarcastically compares the Agency to Hogwarts.
- The opening of the review of Ra.One references the song Voyage, voyage by the French singer Desireless.
- In the same episode, Karim and Gilles compare the relationship between Prateek, his father and G.One, the video game character the latter designed, to the relationship between Bart Simpson, his father Homer and two characters sharing Homer's face, Krusty the Clown and Radioactive Man.
- To mock the constant Product Placement in The Wizard, he 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.
- In the Tron review, Karim calls the laser that transports Flynn to the virtual world the "kid-shrinking ray".
- 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.
- Before he reviews Annihilation, Karim makes a mini-episode of a show called "Minus 1h59" to quickly recap the first Mortal Kombat film.
- Shown Their Work: The show is very well researched, nearly every episode is an occasion for Karim to give accurate explanations of various rules and techniques of filmmaking and screenwriting.
- Sidekick: In the final episode, Kamel calls Karim his "trusty sidekick" rather than the other way around.
- So Bad, It's Good:
- What Karim thinks of Future Cops, 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.
- While he pans Resident Evil, he mentions that he somewhat recommends The Three Musketeers (2011) from the same director because he finds it sidesplitting.
- So Bad, It's Horrible: On the other hand, he finds Uwe Boll's other films Alone in the Dark and Postal irredeemable, the former because of its boring and unintelligible story even though it barely has one, the latter because of its gratuitous vulgarity in an unconvincing attempt to look subversive, and he mercilessly pans both.
- Song Parody:
- The review of Max Payne ends with a list of films better than the latter sung to the tune of "Turkey in the Straw".
- The opening of the review of Dead or Alive is sung to the tune of "Carol of the Bells" since it's a Christmas Episode.
- Sophisticated as Hell: While Karim usually keeps a polished speech, he's not above dropping a Precision F-Strike here and there.
- Speaks in Shout-Outs: In the review of G@mer, to mock the main characters' constant, gratuitous name-dropping, a skit shows Karim and Gilles chatting using nothing but name-dropping.
- Gilles: Chewbacca Harry Potter Kill Bill Scorsese.
Karim: Mega Man Zelda Metal Gear?
Gilles: Terminator Star Trek!
Karim: Terminator Star Trek? Final Fantasy Yoshi Game Boy!
- Special Effect Failure: Karim points out countless examples since many of the reviewed films feature terrible CGI, although there are also some instances of awful practical effects, for instance he calls Double Dragon's Abobo an "abomination from the disgusting imagination of a special effects department chock full of alcoholics".
- Spiritual Adaptation: Karim calls Annihilation an adaptation of a Final Fantasy game's world map, what with all the Random Encounters.
- Spoiler: The reviews usually have a summary of the whole plot, including the ending. When dealing with a film with a twist ending, Karim 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.
- The "plans" of the villains in The Spirits Within and Annihilation are told with childish drawings and narration.
- Similarly, the plans of the heroes in Double Dragon and Hitman are awkwardly explained by Jérémy using slides.
- Ra.One's plot makes so little sense that Karim decides to make up his own instead and starts telling it with crude drawings before Kamel calls him out.
- The review of The Spirits Within ends with a barely animated skit made of stock pictures cut and pasted together.
- 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?- When Karim discusses The Spirits Within's enormous budget, he mentions he finds it terrifying that Asterix at the Olympic Games was almost as expensive.
- In the same episode, when Kamel hears that the song over The Spirits Within's ending credits is sung by the French singer Lara Fabian, he whips out painkillers.
- When Karim tries to strangle himself after watching House of the Dead, Gilles compares his ridiculous acting to Marion Cotillard's.
- In the Street Fighter episode, Karim says he's glad he grew up in The '90s because it was an important era for cinema but that that decade also had its shameful moments... such as Hélène et les Garçons.
- Take That, Audience!: Karim points out that some films that claim to be made for gamers are actually rather insulting toward them, for instance he criticizes Stay Alive for portraying its gamer protagonists as childish morons and Gamer for portraying all gamers as perverts or bloodthirsty psychopaths. Resident Evil is a subtler example, Karim criticizes it for being an action film pretending to be a horror movie and theorizes that the studio assumed that gamers would be too dumb to enjoy an actual horror movie and would just want to see gunfights. Similarly, he believes that the reason why Annihilation has effectively no plot is that the studio expected gamers not to care and to instead only be interested in the constant fight scenes and fanservice.
- 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.
- Terrible Artist:
- Karim likes making childish drawings of sphinxes for no reason in the review of Postal and believes they're beautiful.
- Kamel makes a crude sculpture with Babybel wax in the review of Gamer.
- They Copied It, So It Sucks!:
- Karim heavily criticizes Ra.One for being a blatant rip-off of Terminator 2, he even lists all of the scenes and elements the former lifted from the latter.
- Similarly, he criticizes The Wizard for lifting many elements from Rain Man.
- He accuses Uwe Boll of plagiarizing shots from Jaws 1 in House of the Dead and points out that this makes no sense to even do that since the threat in a zombie movie is obviously not going to come from the sea.
- Toilet Humor:
- Mocked in the review of House Of The Dead, where Karim cheers with his friends at each element of the sacred trinity - a puke joke, a pee joke, and a crap joke.
- In the review of WarGames, it's implied that Kamel was once thrown out of Space Mountain for urinating in it.
- Too Much Information: After Karim compares Resident Evil's awful soundtrack to the works of the French disc jockey DJ Aspé and plays a few seconds of a horribly cringeworthy music video he made, Kamel has this reaction.
- Tropaholics Anonymous: The review of Gamer starts with Karim solemnly declaring that he has a problem he wants to talk about... he loves 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".
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: After Karim explains how the very gross Organic Technology of eXistenZ works, he shows a picture of children reacting to what he just said... and is disturbed to see they loved it.Karim: What's with this generation!?
- Typecasting: Karim points out that Michelle Rodriguez's Action Girl character in Resident Evil is basically the same as every other character she ever played.
- Uncanny Valley: Defined and discussed in the review of The Spirits Within due to its use of photorealistic CGI.
- Unusual Euphemism: When he learns about the existence of Future Cops, Kamel drops a "bawdy-house of excrement!", a sanitized version of the French swear bordel de merde (literally "whorehouse of shit").
- Video Game Movies Suck: The whole point of the episodes where game adaptations are reviewed is to study why. Interestingly, while the review of House of the Dead points out that there isn't enough content in some games to make a good movie no matter what, the review of Max Payne then shows that you can also fail to adapt a game which does have more than enough content and already features lots of movie references, Karim even claims that the game Max Payne is actually a better film than the film.
- Viewer Pronunciation Confusion:
- In-universe, Karim isn't sure how to pronounce Anubhav Sinha's name, so Kamel decides to get Karim's name wrong to compensate.
- Similarly, he doesn't know how James Yukich's surname is pronounced and mentions that to makes matters worse, he has always heard Roland Emmerich's surname pronounced "Emmerick" but Milla Jovovich's pronounced "Jovovitch".
- Viewers Are Morons: Karim criticizes the Silent Hill film for explaining everything whereas the games do the opposite and feels the viewers' intelligence is insulted.
- Voice of the Legion:
- Karim speaks with this effect when he calls the Future Cops by the literal French translation of their name, les Flics du Futur.
- Also happens whenever Karim says CyberGod, the title The Lawnmower Man had during its pre-production.
- What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?:
- Karim is shocked to see a surprisingly violent scene in The Last Starfighter and offers his audience the phone number of a child therapist.
- He also thanks Disney for showing kids a rather gory death scene in Tron.
- What, Exactly, Is His Job?: In the King of Kong review, nobody knows why Jérémy is in the team, not even him.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Karim criticizes Gamer for repeatedly introducing side characters then never mentioning them again.
- 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".
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Repeatedly mocked in the review of Gamer, which is full of scenes where the villains can easily shoot the protagonist dead but instead do stupid things, allowing him to survive. Every time this happens, Kamel suggests they shoot him in the head, only for Karim to describe how they then do anything but that.
- 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.
- With Friends Like These...: In the Silent Hill episode, Karim repeatedly shows "moments of happiness and carefreedom" he had with his friends, but the one that plays at the end of the episode instead shows him and Jérémy beating each other up... while the theme from A Summer Place plays.
- Word Salad Title: Gilles is mentioned to have released a music album whose title translates as Seventy-One Fragments of a Chronology of Desire.
- Writer Behind the Times: Karim accuses Stay Alive of being 20 years late in that it's a completely cookie-cutter Slasher Movie that plays straight every cliché Scream (1996) had discredited a decade before.
- Wrongfully Attributed: Played for laughs in the review of Postal, where "if you censor censorship, it cancels itself" is misattributed to Shakespeare as justification for using 2 layers of Gag Censor.
- 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's 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.
