Point Blank (2010) – A Film Review
In Tell No One (2006), Gilles Lellouche plays a tough criminal who comes to the aid of a doctor caught up in extraordinary events and on the run from the law. In this thriller from director Fred Cavayé, though, Mr. Lellouche plays a trainee nurse caught up in extraordinary events, on the run from the law, and who is in need of assistance from a tough crimimal (Roschdy Zem). Yet, whereas the earlier work balanced its many action scenes with a script that offered up a few decent twists and turns, Point Blank has all of the testosterone-pumping energy that you might expect from a Hollywood offering of the same name. Indeed, it even manages to make Mesrine (2008) seem like a film about schoolgirls picking daisies by a babbling brook – a comparison partly inspired by Gérard Lanvin following up his “hard man” role in the latter with the part of an enigmatic. growling cop in this one.
Essentially, it is the sort of work that likes to turn the set into matchsticks, to make busy with the sweat, blood, and injuries, and to never feel to shy about giving an already convoluted plot a final preposterous tweak or two. Indeed, to the extent that there is a plot here, Mr. Lellouche’s character saves a man’s life, but soon has cause to regret it as he becomes an unwilling agent in getting the man out of the hospital afterwards. From thereon-in, it gets progressively sillier until a scene reminiscent of the first Terminator and Matrix movies respectively pops up to provide us with a breathless but tidy conclusion. To put it all another way, this film is nothing if not derivative city.
And, yes, fear not, for that is the epilogue at the end and not the start of some entirely undesirable fourth act.
