Movies Reviews

Point Blank – Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson Jul 29, 2011, 15:00 GMT

Samuel Pierret (Gilles Lellouche) is a nurse who saves the wrong guy -- a thief (Roschdy Zem) whose henchmen take Samuel\'s pregnant wife (Elena Anaya) hostage to force him to spring their boss from the hospital. A race through the subways and streets of Paris ensues, and the body count rises. Can Samuel evade the cops and the criminal underground and deliver his beloved to safety? ...more

Two nicely sinister leads put this action thriller one step ahead of the pack.

Director/writer Fred Cavayé (co-written with Guillaume Lemans) rounds the first turn after coming off the block with his Best First Work César Nominated “Anything for Her” in 2008.

“Point Blank” sticks to the same theme as “Anything” and further mines the seemingly inexhaustible wealth of angst brewing in the corrupt cop genre.

Samuel Pierret (Gilles Lellouche) is happily married to Nadia (Elena Anaya) who is pregnant with their first child. If you have seen the trailers for this frenetic pot-boiler you know that will not last for long.

As Pierret is finishing his shift as a nurse at the local hospital a stranger walks in and cuts the respirator hose of one of the patients. No, this is not Jack Kevorkian come back to life to put someone out of his misery. It is one of the most dreadful and well-played villains in the French police force taking out a man with a very important secret.

As luck would have it, Pierret saves the man’s life, thereby becoming the next target for the bad guys. They kidnap his wife and threaten to kill her unless the hapless nurse kidnaps the patient who is the mob target and delivers him to Mr. Big, Commandant Patrick Werner (Gérard Lanvin).

Werner (what a great Nazi-like name for a Frenchman) has some special interrogation in mind for the patient and ace safe-cracker former employee Hugo Sartet (Roschdy Zem). Werner planned to murder Sartet when his job was done but the thief slipped away. Pretty durn good mayhem ensues.

“Point Blank” is a film that could have easily gone the way of the direct-to-DVD cop/gangster shoot ‘em up.

The film is saved from tedious mediocrity by the bond of friendship that is forged between professional mobster Sartet and hubby/nurse Pierret. Sartet is forced to do whatever it takes to get his wife back and Sartet is forced to do whatever it takes to escape and expose a powerful cadre of corrupt and desperate police officers who rule a Gotham-like city with an iron fist.

The gangster and the nurse are roiled in a red-hot cement mixer of bullets, blood and betrayal. This is where the film takes a step above the normal. Director Cavayé and the two leads are able to forge a critical bond between the two unlikely allies.

Hating and distrusting each other in the beginning, events force them to put their differences aside ad join forces for the common good. There is a great sense of redemption here for the safe-cracker Sartet and self-sacrifice inspired by love for the husband Pierret.

The action in “Point Blank” starts from the beginning and never lets up. The car crashes and chases through traffic are blessedly few. Honking horns, screeching tires and crunching car bodies should be banned from film for the next ten or twenty years. They have become an excuse for film making instead of a part of it.

Leveraging the tension of the high-stakes kidnapping the screenplay ramps up to the bigger picture of organized crime. This expands the visibility of the audience and exposes the breadth and intensity of the enemy.

Next, the action reaches a fever pitch with a police riot at headquarters executed by the underground street allies of the ever-more-clever Sartet. This is another major elevation of the action above and beyond the normal cops and robbers storyline.

Seemingly every man for himself, the very pregnant Nadia fights off the evil female police officer who is trying to push her out the window while Pierret fights the entire Gotham police force to get to the one man who can help him.

The cast and crew of this film have produced something that is a cut above average, echoing shades of “French Connection” with a silently sinister nod to “No Country for Old Men.

There is nobody like Gene Hackman or Javier Bardem on screen but the movie forges ahead with non-stop action anyway. Roschdy Zem, especially, plays a good hoodlum as the scary and smart Sartet, reminiscent of Bardem’s scene in “No Country” as he is being sewn back together by Pierret, without anesthetic, of course.

Although there are not a lot of surprises in this film, there is high quality non-stop action with great cinematography and a believable story line. The good flick for those aficionados of action thrillers that put the action first and the dialog second. 
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Directed by: Fred Cavayé
Written by: Fred Cavayé and Guillaume Lemans
Starring: Gilles Lellouche, Roschdy Zem and Gérard Lanvin
Release Date: July 29, 2011
MPAA: Not Rated
Runtime: 84 minutes
Country: France
Language: French
Color: Color