Story and Review:
Although deceptively simple, a good action movie is hard to achieve. There’s the choreography of the death-defying stunts and the mile-a-second car chases to worry about, and we’ve yet to get to the characters. We don’t need too much backstory to get the action rolling, but we need enough stakes to follow our heroes jumping through windows and entering into one gunfight after another. Too little narrative, and unless you’re here for fight scenes—which might be what draws you to seek out these movies in the first place—there’s little to keep your attention between fisticuffs and shoot outs. It’s a delicate, high-octave, high-wire act that soars or falls flat, sometimes too literally. Rodolphe Lauga’s French action thriller “Ad Vitam” has its moments of excitement, but its threadbare plot between actions scenes fails to keep the heart racing. In the movie, Franck (Guillaume Canet) survives an attempted murder at work only to come home and find attackers invading his home to kidnap his very pregnant wife, Léo (Stéphane Caillard). In a flashback, we learn the couple met when training for the French Elite Intervention Squad (GIGN), and despite the dangers of their job, find love. Unfortunately, Franck’s career is cut short when he fails to follow orders during a call that costs two men in his charge their lives. Now, he must connect the dots between the past and the present and save his kidnapped wife while evading the rest of France’s police force that’s looking for him for a suspected murder case.
0 comments: