Director Julien Leclercq’s grippingly re-creates the true story of the hijacking by Arab militants of an Air France plane with 227 passengers at the Algiers airport on Christmas Eve, 1994. His taut film bulldozes through a tense 48 hours in which the drama unfolds in a swift 90 minutes, rarely stopping to take a breath. When it does, it’s usually to drop in at the home of Thierry (Vincent Elbaz), a member of the French elite paramilitary squad (known as GIGN), whose worried wife and adorable young daughter sit and wait, hoping that something dreadful doesn’t happen to their husband/father.
That it’s played for maximum suspense and minimal nuance are the casualties of this type of movie, post-Sept. 11, when dreadful consequences are built-in and don’t have to be mapped out for the audience. In addition, the “Bourne” movies have spawned 21st century thrillers that are wonderful technologically but coldly impersonal. The Assault follows suit, for better or worse.
Most of the plot plays out as high-stakes espionage drama—lots of frantic calls between the hijackers and the authorities, lots of fraught official meetings to decide on a course of action. Leclercq dutifully trots out the new action movie tropes (jittery hand-held camerawork, endless quick cutting, characters filmed in shadows whether a scene calls for it or not). Since this true story is tailor-made for a fast-moving, multiple-locale film, Leclercq does what most directors would. Too bad it all remains remote, even when there’s continued crosscutting to Thierry’s suffering family.
The intensity is ratcheted up even higher for the finale as the GIGN forces storm the plane and engage the terrorists in a deadly shootout, which we see through countless points of view: members of the squad, anti-terrorism officials watching on TV, and Thierry’s poor wife and kid cringing at everything they’re seeing on the tube. Cutting among them—and cranking up Jean-Jacques Hertz and François Roy’s orchestral music—actually undercuts, rather than accentuates, the tension, since the unfolding action is heart pounding enough. The rest is overkill.
The Assault might work best as a 90-minute thrill ride, but there is a kernel of food for thought when it ends.
I don’t know if Leclercq intended this—because he sidesteps politics entirely throughout the movie, focusing
instead on the government’s anti-terrorist plan of action—but an onscreen postscript notes that these hijackers were probably going to fly their plane into the Eiffel Tower, seven years before the September 11 attacks, which reminds me of the Bush administration’s ludicrous claim that no one would ever have thought that anyone would fly planes into buildings.
