Gangsters (2002) - film review

After a hold-up that goes badly wrong, crook Franck Chaievski and his girl Nina are taken into police custody.  Their interrogators are determined to locate the missing booty, a briefcase filled with diamonds.  Unfortunately for Franck, the police are not as clean as they pretend to be…

For his directorial début, Olivier Marchal makes a spirited attempt to update the kind of film that was hugely popular in the 1980s, the action-gangster film.  Before becoming an actor, Marchal spent ten years in the Paris police force, something which he calls upon to give his film its realist edge. Despite this, he still manages to fall back on the familiar tiresome clichés.

The film’s strongest selling point is Anne Parillaud, best known for her striking performance in Luc Besson’s cult 1990 thriller, Nikita.   Her co-star, Richard Anconina, is less convincing, his reputation for playing sympathetic roles preventing his character from having the kind of moral ambiguity the film requires.

Extensive use of flashbacks and close-to-the-knuckle violence gives the film an original sheen, but the fancy editing and camera work cannot hide the fact that, scenario-wise, the film has nothing to offer that has not already been tried many, many times before, and more successfully.

© James Travers 2005

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