Les Rivières pourpres II – Les anges de l’apocalypse (2004) - film review

In a monastery in Lorraine, a monk is nailing a crucifix onto a stone wall when blood begins to flow.....  Behind the wall, the body of a dead man is found.   Investigating the case, Commissaire Pierre Niemans suspects this may not be an ordinary murder.  He is right.  A young police captain Reda has just prevented the killing of a man resembling Jesus Christ.  But other murders follow in quick and spectacular fashion, and it can hardly be a coincidence that each victim carries the name of one of Christ’s disciples...

The much-publicised "sequel" to Mathieu Kassovitz’s popular 2000 film Les Rivières pourpres takes the big budget Grand Guignol spectacle of guns and gore up several notches whilst happily flushing virtually every last ounce of charm, realism and artistic merit down the toilet.   Jean Reno is back for a second round of mindless no-strings thuggery, this time paired with Benoît Magimel, whose casting as a replacement for Vincent Cassel makes about as much sense as replacing Darth Vader with Kermit the Frog in the second Star Wars film.   Heaven alone knows what induced Christopher Lee to sign up for a part in this cinematic monstrosity – one suspects that witchcraft, demonic powers and the might of the Inland Revenue may have been involved.  

Before he won almost universal acclaim for his direction of the 2007 Edith Piaf biopic La Môme, Olivier Dahan was not considered that seriously in France.  Whatever credibility he had gained with his early directorial offerings – Déjà mort (1998) and La Vie promise (2002) – was virtually decimated by his work on Les Rivières pourpres II.  Whilst some critics praised Dahan for his daring reinterpretation of the adventure thriller genre, many more were spouting invective, sarcasm and vile in the way that only French film critics and British tabloid journalists know how to.

Whatever else may be said about Les Rivières pourpres II, it certainly makes a strong visual statement, albeit in much the same way as a clout on the head with a garden spade does.  The gauzy, low resolution digital photography gives the film a distinctive dreamlike character which, visually at least, makes the film more interesting than its predecessor.   Unfortunately, Dahan and his team get well and truly carried away and the surfeit of artistic style quickly becomes tedious and migraine-inducing.

The plot, what there is of it (something about flying bullet-proof monks prosecuting a bloody vendetta against people with religious first names whilst helping Christopher Lee on his treasure hunt), is something that the average nine-year-old would dismiss as childish.  And whatever characterisation there might be lurking in the crevices of the festering morass of mediocrity that goes by the name of a screenplay is swept away and drowned in a record-breaking tsunami of stylistic excess.  Les Rivières pourpres II is silly but, worse than that, it takes itself far too seriously to be fun.  A propos, that scene in the supermarket (in which a group of Dominican hoodies go on an eco-friendly two-for-the-price-of-one killing spree) is pretty mild compared with what you see in Tesco’s on most Saturday mornings...

© James Travers 2008

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?