A group of gangsters are bored with their usual "sources of income" and decide to be creative in making money with kidnapping celebrities and political figures. Very clever and funny.

When they realize the times are changing, five crooks decide to switch from bank robberies to personality abductions. Among their hostages are singer Johnny Hallyday and an ambassador in Latin America. They get framed by a guerrilla leader, who had been kidnapped by them before, and while being tried the French Government decides to let them flee to Africa where they get on with the same old game.—Bernard Dionne <[email protected]>

The film begins at the trial of five criminals, then flashbacks to the individual capers that led them together, showing their skills as well as their bumbling inefficiencies. Starting out as petty thieves and forgers, they decide to make it big. Taking lessons in every conceivable form of extreme politics, they pick up a variety of half-digested ideologies and then proceed to hire themselves out to the highest bidder. They kidnap pop idol Johnny Halladay by convincing him that the ransom is worth twice as much in publicity. They then kidnap a Swiss diplomat for a Latin-American revolutionary group and then double cross the rebel leader by selling him to three other groups. They hijack a German 747 jet and then strike a bargain with the German Insurance Company, using phonetic speech written for them since none of the five speak German. Their final caper is to kidnap the Pope, and the ransom is the donation of one franc from every Catholic in the world.—Les Adams <[email protected]>