Attention bandits! (1986) - film review

Simon Verini, a once notorious crook, comes out of retirement when Mozart, the young leader of a band of jewel thieves, puts some business his way.   Whilst Verini is away in Holland, to find a buyer for Mozart’s stolen jewels, his wife is kidnapped and held to ransom.  Although Verini hands over the jewels to the kidnapper, his wife is shot dead before his eyes.  Shortly after, he is arrested for the theft of the jewels and sent to prison for ten years.  Before his arrest, he has just enough time to find a place for his daughter, Marie-Sophie, in an elite Swiss boarding school.  Leaving prison ten years later, Verini collects his daughter, now a grown-up young woman, and tracks down his wife’s killer.  He has no sooner taken his revenge than he is arrested a second time.  Mozart tells Marie-Sophie he will help her father to escape from prison if she promises to marry him.   Marie-Sophie agrees, although she is already engaged to another man...

By the mid-1980s, the policier was starting to go out of fashion in France, but this did not deter director Claude Lelouch from pursuing his take on this familiar genre.  With tongue firmly in cheek, the film makes repeated references to French cinema’s affinity for the gangster film, whilst lamenting the passing of the genre’s biggest asset, Jean Gabin.  Perhaps the post-modern wit is carried a bit too far in places – the prison escape sequence would not be out of place in an out and out farce – but it does provide the spectator with some unexpected fun.   In fact, it is probably the film’s comic touches which save the film; without these, it would be just another tired 1980s crime drama.

Jean Yanne’s very creditable performance – combining the brutality of a hardened criminal with the tenderness of a loving father – is the other thing which works to the film’s advantage, compensating for the somewhat lacklustre contributions from his co-stars, Patrick Bruel and Marie-Sophie L. (the director’s wife).  In spite of this, and in spite of the fact that the narrative crawls to a snail’s pace in a few places, Attention bandits is not as bad as you might expect.  It is prettily filmed, far less pretentious and exploitative than Lelouch’s other 1980s offerings, and joyously funny in places.

© James Travers 2004

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?