Review of Point Blank (2010) by Heather M — 15 May 2011

Saw it in French with Subtitles.

Not very deep but very entertaining, especially if you like action movies. This is the first Cavaya film I've seen and one of the most enjoyable action movies I've seen since Liam Neeson in Taken. It does what it sets out to do, which I like about any movie in any genre.

The movie starts out with a chase and someone almost getting killed and cuts back to a scene where we meet our hero. And he's a great hero. It is the perfect fish-out-of-water story. Samuel is a mild-mannered nurse-in-training who thinks he sees a "thingy" on the sonogram but it is his unborn daughter's finger, and who has a hormonal wife Nadia who is preggers on bedrest.

Samuel gets pulled into the story that the film opens with when the chased man ends up in his hospital. Even then, he's got to be submissive to the young doctor who condescendingly chastises him. The action doesn't really slow down the whole time. I'm not a big one for spoilers but the injured chased man from the beginning of the movie, Sartet, becomes the anti-hero. He is definitely shady does what needs to get done and knows what to do to get there. Samuel has plenty of guts and is willing to go far to save his pregnant wife, just not enough experience to know what to do.

For every hero, there has to be a villain. The nice thing about this movie is that aside from the very obvious innocent hero and his wife, you don't know who is who, how they are connected or who to trust for much of the movie, but that doesn't slow it down at all. You figure it out as the hero figures it out, quickly and on the run and assumptions are quickly revealed to be mistaken ideas.

Mirroring the idea that assumptions can be thrown out the window, there's a veiled commentary on the roles men and women in this movie. From within Samuel and Nadia's relationship, to his job as a nurse to the "successful" cops on the police force. Convention gets both highlighted and flipped on its head. The hard-working woman cop who we sense is going to save the day is revealed to have essentially hit the glass ceiling. Convention gets maintained. Meanwhile, it is completely flipped when the woman who is a bad guy, who we would normally think to be the one who is sympathetic to pregnant Nadia is the one who blows smoke in her face and tries to kill her. Convention flipped.

Lastly the ending...while we get to see our hero's ending, the real ending, some think may be unnecessary but I think adds a great bit of closure both for us and for the anti-hero.

The actors playing Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) and Sartet (Roschdy Zem) are both excellent and carry the film and Gerard Lanvin plays a great bad guy. I'm sure we'll be seeing more of the actress Claire Perot, who plays the junior woman on the woman commander's team, who appears to be a French Jennifer Garner.