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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
POINT BLANK A thrill ride that rarely lets up during its taut 85-minute running time, French director Fred Cavayé’s Point Blank is surely a prime candidate for a Hollywood remake. In the Hitchcock tradition of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, nurse trainee Samuel’s beautiful and pregnant wife Nadia is kidnapped before his very eyes. When the kidnapers call him, they order him to spring Sartet, an injured criminal in a hospital under police guard. In order to get his wife back, Samuel has to deal with double-crossing, murderous crooks, and the police, and finds his own moral boundaries tested again and again. Although mainly interested in non-stop action, Cavayé and co-writer Guillaume Lemans know audiences must have an emotional attachment to the hero. They establish that in a few fleet early scenes of tenderness between Samuel and Nadia when they see their baby’s ultrasound and share a casual moment of domestic bliss immediately before the brutal criminal world intrudes into their home. And boy does it intrude! The first shot of the film of an unidentified man slamming into a chain link fence as he runs from two armed men throws us right into the dangerous world that Samuel and Nadia soon are part of. Nearly the entire movie remains at that same breathless pace. It’s telling that the lone breather for both the audience and the characters is an overlong explanation about why Samuel and Sartet are being targeted that unnecessarily replays the opening moments in a new context. Except for this over-explanatory sequence, the film’s momentum doesn’t flag. An exciting chase on foot through the Paris Metro is followed by an irresistible finale in which Sartet’s underworld buddies mastermind a simultaneous series of petty crimes in order to infiltrate the local police precinct to look for an incriminating piece of evidence. Veteran Gerard Lanvin (Mesrine, The Taste of Others) makes a scarily psychotic police commander on the wrong side of the law, while Mireille Perrier nicely underplays his opposite, an honest cop. Roschdy Zem is charismatically cunning as Sartet, who becomes Samuel’s unlikely partner in crime. And although her striking statuesque beauty makes her look more like a supermodel than an ordinary expectant mother, Elena Anaya enacts Nadia so intensely that she compels our attention. But the film ultimately rests on the shoulders of Gilles Lellouche. He becomes a most believable and immensely likeable everyman, even when the script makes him attempt things that stretch credulity, which is par for the course in a movie like this. Point Blank
is the opposite of Paul Haggis’ turgid The Next Three Days, which
dawdled and dragged its way through a similar storyline for two-plus
hours. That movie
was based on Cayavé’s earlier thriller Anything for Her. Here’s
hoping Haggis doesn’t go anywhere near the inevitable American version
of Point Blank.
Kevin Filipski
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