Empties comes billed as the most commercially successful production in the history of the Czech Republic, and can be seen as a thematic sequel of sorts to director Jan Sverak’s last record-breaking hit — the Oscar-winning Kolya. Depending on your tastes, this may be all you need to know in order to avoid it.

Like Kolya, Empties is an exercise in carefully calibrated cuteness. Tkaloun (played by Zdenek Sverak, the screenwriter and also the director’s father) is a sexagenarian Prague schoolteacher who leaves his job after a confrontation with a student; newly housebound with his sweet but nagging wife, he realizes he still has some living to do. After a failed stint as a bike messenger, Tkaloun gets a job in a supermarket’s bottle-return department, which becomes the home base for hatching a variety of sweetly self-serving schemes.

Sverak the Elder is endearing enough onscreen, but his script is a flabby, shapeless mess. Besides telegraphing certain key themes, (Tkaloun eventually loses his job to a machine; damn you, modernity!) Sverak fudges various character arcs: our hero’s religious-fanatic daughter is given particularly unflattering treatment. And the climax, involving a hot-air balloon chase that doubles as a metaphor for marriage’s ups and downs, is rendered even more ludicrous by the release of Up — a far superior tale of late-life crisis.

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