Paris. Rene is a corrupt cop who takes bribes, racketeers off street thugs to pretend he doesn't notice their street games, eats free at restaurants and bets on horse races. This naturally shocks his new partner, the idealistic François who aspires to become a police commissioner. François arrests a burglar who stole a purse, but Rene let's the man go in the police office, writting a report that the thug found the lost purse on the street and came to return it. Rene aims to corrupt François by setting him up with prostitute Natasha who scams him by leading him out to dine at a Russian bistro, where François is charged with an impossibly high bill, and is thus broke. Little by little, François accepts corruption, and even demands higher bribes on the street than Rene. They both agree to rob the drug-dealer Camoun and steal away his briefcase with money for themselves. Camoun chases Rene, but his men are blown up in the explosion in Rene's building. Rene is sentenced to two years in prison, while François kept the money. When Rene is released from prison, François awaits him with a horse carriage.
One of the biggest successes in the career of comedy director Claude Zidi, "My New Partner" not only sold 5.8 million tickets at the French box office, but Zidi also took home the César Award for best film and best director, a rare feat for a comedy. "My New Partner" takes the dark subject of police corruption, but unexpectedly presents it as a comedy, creating a refreshingly daft film with several great gags, though a one that gets less funny and less inspired as the time goes by. Philippe Noiret is excellent as the corrupt cop Rene, and the opening sequence is already brilliantly hilarious: Rene and his cop partner Pierrot rob a pimp at a street at night, but then the police vehicle shows up, so they have to flee the scene. They run across the stairs, but another police car shows up on the other end. So Rene gets an idea: he arrests Pierrot, and when the police shows up, he identifies himself as police detective Rene who caught one suspect, and feigns that the "other one" fled in other direction. When returning back to the scene, he spots Pierrot and feigns he is shocked he arrested a cop in the dark. This already establishes what kind of a character Rene is, and naturally he is assigned a new partner, the idealistic François, making the clash inevitable. When François arrests a pickpocket, Rene let's him go, scolding François that the police had over 3000 arrests already in the neighborhood, and that the police is instructed not to arrests "small fish" to not increase this statistic because their area might be declared a crime zone. Unfortunately, Zidi loses his inspiration half-way into the film, since the best jokes and ideas are found only in the first half, but the second half is tiresome, stiff, routine and mechanical, showing the authors exhausted their potentials beyond the 50-minute mark. The subfuse finale leaves something to be desired in the structure of the film, yet it has so many highlights in the first half that it deserves to be seen.
Grade:++
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