Starring Kad Merad and Dany Boon. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, January 23, at the Park Theatre

The specificity of regional humour may be why a relatively unassuming comedy has shot to the top of all-time French box-office records, beating out not only local fare but also blockbuster imported stuff. Of course, the fact that much of its humour is broadly obvious—almost American—is a feature of the film’s success. Should it surprise, then, that Will Smith has bought the rights for a U.S. remake?

Actually, I was thinking Jim Carrey during the low-key saga of French post-office manager Philippe Abrams (Kad Merad) and his ineffectual attempt to get transferred to the French Riviera, mainly to please his perpetually grumpy wife (Zoé Félix). Instead, he gets shipped to a southerner’s idea of Siberia: the far north of Pas-de-Calais.

Abrams decides to try out his punishment alone, in the village of Bergues. To his amazement, though, the place is fun and the locals are friendly once he gets used to their curiously Flemish-influenced patois. In particular, he gets enmeshed in the domestic travails of slightly dopey mailman Antoine (Dany Boon, also the writer and director); the goofy-looking guy still lives with his terror of a maman (French veteran Line Renaud), one reason he has failed at wooing the post-office hottie (Anne Marivin).

The main twist is that Abrams’s wife and friends down south refuse to believe that things aren’t that bad on the far coast, so he continues to feed them horror stories, leading to a showdown that wouldn’t be out of place in a movie starring, well, Will Smith or Jim Carrey.

Welcome to the Sticks left me moderately cold, mainly due to thin character development, but fans of unchallenging “foreign” fare will like it. There are repetitive (and cleverly subtitled) bloopers at the end, serving to illustrate just how hard, if not hilarious, it is to master someone else’s dialect.