The plot is lame and takes a despicable turn. Shooting such a dark plot just as an ordinary chase movie is nowhere acceptable. Fortunately Albert Dupontel is always good at fleshing up humane character from very little and he makes this mess quite watchable.
Remove Dupontel, put a less capable actor in the lead and you get a real dud. Alice Taglioni is OK, but they really forget to establish her as a physical character (clearly her abilities her first sequence are not displayed in an efficient way, and then it's a drag for the rest of the movie). Zinedine Soualem is barely a background player so it does hurt the movie to give him a serious part. The same goes for all the police squad, they are shot like a nice clean professional team: closer to a sitcom than in line with our disturbingly violent subject matter.
And yes graphic violence really cripples a movie when it comes out of the blue and not as a closing argument for tension and suspense.
I was not impressed by Eric Valette's Maléfique, precisely because it was all forced before us to be impressed. Here he does a good job of shooting a sharp chase movie, except it is definitely not the script he was given.
Remove Dupontel, put a less capable actor in the lead and you get a real dud. Alice Taglioni is OK, but they really forget to establish her as a physical character (clearly her abilities her first sequence are not displayed in an efficient way, and then it's a drag for the rest of the movie). Zinedine Soualem is barely a background player so it does hurt the movie to give him a serious part. The same goes for all the police squad, they are shot like a nice clean professional team: closer to a sitcom than in line with our disturbingly violent subject matter.
And yes graphic violence really cripples a movie when it comes out of the blue and not as a closing argument for tension and suspense.
I was not impressed by Eric Valette's Maléfique, precisely because it was all forced before us to be impressed. Here he does a good job of shooting a sharp chase movie, except it is definitely not the script he was given.