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MovieMail's Review
A wild ride of a thriller from Fred Cavayé (Anything For Her), Point Blank is proof that French cinema currently tops the bill for high-quality crime filmmaking, says Barry Forshaw.
Occasionally a film appears which becomes so freighted with enthusiastic word-of-mouth that it is a cause célèbre even before many people have seen it. Fred Cavayé’s Point Blank is such a film, and it really is not hard to see why. This is truly kinetic filmmaking, bristling with an energy and inventiveness that practically leap off the screen - and it is further proof (if proof is needed) that the French cinema is currently one of the world's key repositories for top-notch crime filmmaking. Recently, it has been French television that has hijacked the tough and uncompromising crime drama with the excellent Spiral, but the centre of gravity has suddenly relocated to the cinema with this pulse-accelerating effort.
Director Fred Cavayé had previously made a mark with Pour Elle, the ingenious prison-break thriller that suffered the inevitable low-voltage American remake (which may well be the case with the new film). This one begins explosively with a chase on foot as a wounded man is followed by two hit men. But just as he is about to be shot, the fugitive (Roschdy Zem) is struck by a motorbike in an underpass and suffers serious injury. As the unconscious man lies in hospital, a trainee nurse (played by the ever-reliable Gilles Lellouche) is fussing over his heavily pregnant wife - and preparing for a happy, settled life. But in the first of several echoes of Alfred Hitchcock, this innocent man is to find himself thrown into situations of extreme danger and violence when his wife is kidnapped by associates of the injured man. He is told that she will die unless he is able to spirit the under-guard patient out of the hospital.
What follows is the wildest of rides, with an edgy alternation between ticking-clock suspense and brutal chases as the everyman hero finds himself caught between ruthless criminals and equally ruthless police officers - who may not be quite what they seem.
With exemplary playing from the various battered-looking protagonists (notably the harried Gilles Lellouche and the terrifying Gérard Lanvin as an implacable cop), the director crams every moment of the film's economical 85 minutes with one relentless sequence after another. If there are any caveats, it might be that the breathless pace allows little time to get to know more about the protagonists (the hapless Lellouche, a passed-over middle-aged female cop, strikingly played by Mireille Perrier), and it certainly shows a dereliction of imagination not to come up with another English title than Point Blank, which already firmly belongs to one of the most celebrated thrillers in the history of the cinema, John Boorman's existential Lee Marvin movie. But these are minor cavils; most people will realise that after the end credits roll, they will hardly have drawn breath - and been unable to drag their eyes away from the screen.
A French action thriller from Fred Cavaye (Anything for Her), Point Blank is a relentless thriller that follows a man as he races through the streets of Paris to save his pregnant wife after she is kidnapped.
Life is going well for young couple Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) and Nadia (Elena Anaya). He is about to qualify as a nurse, and she is about to give birth to their first child. But everything changes when Nadia is kidnapped right in front of Samuel, who is knocked out cold, trying to stop the kidnapper.
When he comes to, his phone is ringing; he has just three hours to get Startet (Roschdy Zem), a man who is under police surveillance, out of the hospital in which Samuel works. His destiny now lies in the hands of a man who is wanted by the police - and if he wants to see his wife again, he is going to have to act fast.
