My nerves are still jangling from having seen "Point Blank" a few weeks ago, and that was before the shut-the-country-down! rhetoric brought America to its present state. But enough about real-world aggravations. Let's talk about a movie, and not just a movie, but a movie-movie, in the spirit of the 2006 thriller "Tell No One."
Some thrillers thrill in theory only, relying on postproduction noise and spazzy editing to do the harder work of the screenplay and the director. "Point Blank," which comes from France at about 5,000 miles per hour, is different. Frantic, violent and unrelenting, it is all of a piece, its tightly packed storytelling making cassoulet of its own implausibilities and familiar terrain covering a web of political and institutional conspiracy.
Mainly, you have to admire the perverse way co-writer and director Fred Cavaye places the very pregnant wife (Elena Anaya) of the main character in ever-more-extreme extremes of danger. Not since John Woo's "Hard Boiled" and its maternity ward shootout has the sanctity of the recently born, or those about to be, been so willfully disregarded.
"Point Blank" hinges on a nursing student's lifesaving act that instantly leads to trouble. The nurse in training is a sturdy, burly fellow played by Gilles Lellouche, who one night in the hospital saves the life of a motorcycle collision victim played by Roschdy Zem.
Someone cuts the patient's oxygen supply; our hero, Samuel, jumps in to save him. Various gangsters for various reasons want the man dead. Circumstances throw Samuel into a role, improvised on the fly, of the injured man's accomplice. "Point Blank" requires the man in white to clear his name, keep his charge alive, tell some dubious cops what's up — and, for a big finish, help deliver his son under the least soothing circumstances imaginable.
With his granite profile and tight-lipped reserve, Lellouche emits a hard charisma as well as a sympathetic air. "Point Blank" (no relation to the 1967 John Boorman drama) is all about forward motion: Characters get creamed by motorcycles, chase each other in the Paris Metro, cause a mass riot in a police station, and no matter how much or little exposition there is to be delivered, the actors treat it seriously and prepare themselves for the next life-and-death scenario.
The experience is all about compression and pacing and surface excitement. Yet the evolving relationship between Lellouche's Samuel and Zem's cagey Sartet, an honorable thief surrounded by much worse specimens, gives the actors somewhere to go, besides straight ahead, at top cinematic speed.
"Point Blank"
Grade: 3 1/2 out of 4 stars
Genres: Action
Running Time: 84 min
MPAA Rating: R
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