Fred Cavayé / France 2010 / 84 minutes / tbc
GFF @ Cineworld, Sat 19th Feb (15:00)
With an opening of ferocious, provocative energy, Fred Cavayé’s follow-up to Pour Elle (recently remade with Russell Crowe as The Next Three Days) promises much but delivers little.
Lanky, stony-faced crook Hugo Sartet (Roschdy Zem) is on the run from unidentified armed pursuers. Cornered on the autoroute by his would-be assassins, Sartet is horrifically injured by a passing motorcycle and taken to lantern-jawed nurse Samuel’s (Gilles Lellouche) hospital.
What follows, sadly, is an unsatisfying blend of genre cliché and ludicrous plot contrivance. There was potential for an interesting odd-couple dynamic between the two leads, but their startling lack of chemistry and the never sufficiently explained motives of Sartet put paid to that. Visually influenced by Paul Greengrass, the film certainly zips along at a great pace with some half-decent action scenes, but the events on-screen are either too predictable or unbelievably stupid to make it anything other than tedious – even at under 90 minutes.