Effectively a French remake of The Fugitive, based on an American novel and with an Anglo-American soundtrack, this seems to follow in the footsteps of other films we’ve seen this year that suggest that French cinema is trying to leave the arthouses and attract more mainstream crowds. Certainly after the success of the Taxi trilogy it seemed inevitable that French directors would try to intrude on the American filmmaking tradition. But certainly here, where you have shots of a doctor on the run running across a three lane motorway where there’s a pile-up in his absence suggests that we expect Tommy Lee Jones to come around the corner at some point and ask for ‘Doctor Richard Kimble’…
           It is more convoluted than its American peers: the main character gets blamed for a murder he didn’t commit, he gets mysterious messages from a girl who’s meant to be dead and there’s an engaging subplot regarding his relationships with mafia types on the streets of Paris. As French cinema goes, it’s certainly more approachable than a lot of its peers: it’s well directed, it’s pacy and it’s got a good cast. On the other hand it may just alienate people who want French films to be a little bit different. The trailer for the movie that’s doing the rounds at the moment inevitably has no French dialogue in it whatsoever and promotes the fact that it’s by an American genre mystery writer…
        Still, American cinema in general of late has been somewhat lacking in ideas, so to see the French try and insert themselves as a player their thriller market isn’t necessarily a bad idea…