Review of The French Connection (1971) by Hassan I — 28 Sep 2011

This film is very overrated. The characters aren't that interesting or developed, the story is boring, the action is mediocre, it's just not that good a film. Now, before you send me messages saying how "Wrong" I am and that I don't understand this movie, there IS some good things about it.

The suspense is decent, the acting ain't half bad, and this film managed to create a "Cop" sub-genre, but just because this film is revolutionary, doesn't mean it's entertaining.

Now, if you read my reviews often, you probably know that my favorite part of a movie is the characters. They are the reason I'm engrossed in movies like The Blues Brothers, The Shawshank Redemption, Back To The Future, etc, but this film has no good characters.

If I don't care about the characters, then I probably won't care about the movie itself, and in this, the movie isn't strong enough to keep itself above water without good characters. Now, you might be thinking that there's no film that has no good characters, yet doesn't suck, but I know of a few, and probably my favorite is the 2009 Sci-Fi flick "Avatar".

I didn't care much about the characters as they weren't that interesting, but the scale of the movie, the action scenes, the story, and more distracted me from the poor characters, so much so that I even gave the film 5 stars.

THIS film doesn't have any of that, it's just boring, has lame dialogue, and little redeeming factors. Also, the car chase. In my opinion, it's pretty overrated. Sure, it's entirely real, but so was The Blues Brothers chase, which was awesome, and It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (For the most part), which was only OK, but hey, it was better than this.

All that happens in the chase is a car chases a train, the car hits a few cars, the train is hijacked. A few other things happens, but everything else is just either unmemorable or spoilers. So, yeah, it's a pretty bad movie, and I'm shocked it was even mentioned at the Oscars, let alone won a few awards.

I would recommend it to anyone that likes mediocre car chases/crashes and anyone that likes cop movies, but everyone else, leave this movie alone, it's not worth watching. 2 Stars.