Yep, pretty much.
I mean, sure, Jean Reno does his moody, world-weary cop routine to near perfection, Vinnie Cassel is OK as the slightly more wide-eyed detective (witness his meeting with the mother who had become a blind nun), which doesn't really scan and is inconsistent with certain other facets of his character, but yes, in essence, this flick is a gigantic case of style over substance almost to the same extent as something like The O.C. !
(But what scenery ! Some stunning photography to be sure, but this was never going to be enough to compensate for the rest of this unengaging so-called "thriller")
No real character development, a pretty weak pay-off regarding both the revealed twist AND the action at the denouement, and the most ridiculous, out-of-place and hilarious fight scene ever shoe-horned into a movie since Mike Myers' fight with his prospective father-in-law in Wayne's World 2 (with the major difference being that that WAS meant to be funny). I am referring to Vinnie's fight with the skinhead and the boxer, of course, but you knew that already. Do I need to explain why ? It's like they pasted in a fight scene with three background extras from some sub-Jackie Chan martial arts movie !
Sorry to all those of you that were taken in by this, someone even compared it to Se7en - oh, how wrong could you be !
No real sense of tension, since we have no real vested interest in the characters, and the interest in the events is thus never really raised above the level of mild curiosity.
Sure, they try to inject some sense of tension into it by using foreboding music, some gore and dark settings, even using some imagery stolen straight out of Silence of the Lambs, but whereas that particular scene shocked me to the core in Silence, the copy in this barely raised my eyebrow.
A couple of other minor but amusing gripes I had with the movie (which were by no means the only things that spoilt this film for me): funny how Reno's Pierre Niemans never once showed his ID or was ever asked to by any of the members of the public he was questioning / talking to - they just took it for granted he really was the detective he said he was.
Secondly, when Niemans pulls the gun on the other cop/s at the end in an act of impulsive rashness / anger (before they go up the mountain), Max does the same too (to back him up, wouldn't you know), which is idiotic, since any cop in real life would have been more likely to play reconciliator and since everybody there knew they wouldn't shoot anybody. Even more ridiculous is the way they drew out this "tense" (lol) situation by slowly backing away into the sky-lift while STILL HOLDING THE GUNS ON THE OTHER COPS, as if anybody was gonna stop them or as if anyone believed they would shoot - the other cops didn't try to stop them, but that was mainly because what they were about to do wasn't such a big problem for anyone else.
Directed AS WELL AS CO-WRITTEN (adapted) by Mathieu Kassovitz, who you may remember as playing the love interest in Amélie, but who also wrote and directed the blistering La Haine five years before (which launched both his and Vinnie's careers into the big-time), this film was for the most part visually well-put together, with good production design and competently directed, it's mainly the script that let it down big-time. I don't know what the book is like, but if it's any good, it certainly loses a lot in its transposition to the screen.
Mathieu should have known better - but then he *did* also direct Gothika.
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