I
guess there's only so long one can go without writing a load of words
about a movie you watched recently. I've not really written anything
of note since November 2015, there have been reasons, mainly I lost
the passion to do so and started a relationship in my personal life.
Although I have been watching a load of films and since stopping the
old review game, I've missed out on opportunities to review the new
Star Wars, Deadpool, Batman V Superman, Civil War..etc. But I've
finally rediscovered my passion for film reviewing after watching,
strangely enough an older film. I sat down to watch THE FRENCH
CONNECTION 2 the other night for the first time and I had no one to
talk too about it, so I decided...screw it, just write a review. So I
did. Here's my first review of 2016, half way through the year....
THE
FRENCH CONNECTION 2 (1975)
The
70s was the era that cinema started taking risks, be it violence, sex
or drugs, by that I mean taking realistic looks at the seamier side
of life while still trying to tell a coherent, challenging and
involving story. Cinema of the past, i.e. the 30s to the 60s, always
played it safe. This was due to the Motion Picture Production Code or
more commonly known as the “HAYS CODE” which put forth a series
of rules that film makers had to follow to get the film produced. By
the mid to late 60s, the “code”, which you can read more about
HERE, began to lose steam as more and more film makers were becoming
more daring. With the onset of the 70s and a new era of film makers,
films began to challenge the old ways. Films such as Easy Rider,
Panic In Needle Park, The Exorcist, The French Connection and The
Godfather, were films aimed at adults which contained adult themes.
Sure the Wild Bunch came out in 1969 and featured a heavy dose of the
red stuff but screen violence had began shying away from the
bloodless kill in the later part of the 1960.
We've
all seen William Friedkin's utterly brilliant, gritty cop flick The
French Connection, a film that followed a narcotics cop and his
partner as they try to track down the man responsible for filling the
streets of NYC with Heroin. It's not only famous for some brilliant
central performances from Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider but also for
having one of the greatest, edge of your seat car chases ever filmed.
But it was only until very very recently that I finally saw it's
follow-up, 1975's The French Connection 2.
The
film picks up a few years after Hackman's “Popeye” Doyle lets
French drug kingpin Charnier escape his grasp. We find Doyle as he
arrives at the police HQ of Marseilles to track Charnier down. He's
teamed with his French Counterpart, Inspector Henri Barthelemy but is
only allowed to observe. This doesn't sit well with Doyle and during
a raid early in the film gets into a foot chase with a suspected
perp. It turns out that the perp is actually an informant. He has two
escorts put on him and they follow his every move. While watching a
beach volleyball match, Charnier, sitting in a restaurant spots Doyle
and order's his men to capture him. Doyle is drugged and taken to a
rundown hotel where Charnier interrogates him. After a while they
start injecting Doyle with Heroin, forcing him to become an addict.
Doyle becomes the one thing he hates the most, he becomes a junkie.
When they realise they no longer have any use for him they dump him
outside the police station where Barthelemy and some of his men force
him to go cold turkey. He tells them he doesn't remember where they
took him but in reality he does and shows up with a can of petrol. He
calls Barthelemy from a payphone and explains where he is and to
bring water, lots of water. Doyle proceeds to burn the place to the
ground. What Charnier did to Doyle makes him more determined than
ever to take him down, with or without the help of the police. When
Doyle finally gets Charnier in his sights, Charnier makes a break for
it and the film ends with a tense, ten minute foot chase as Doyle,
stubborn as a mule, just won't give up until he has his man.
I
really enjoyed The French Connection 2, I do love the first film
though, this didn't feel like a cop movie even though on it's cover
it is, but to me, this felt more like a revenge film than the typical
cop flick we could have gotten. It has some issues, the pacing is a
little slow at times with lots of scenes of Hackman walking through
streets to music, but when the film is either giving us the action or
the drama, it's on point. There are three big action sequences in the
film, the first is the raid that I mentioned above, the second is a
gun fight under and around a dry docked cargo ship which ends with
the flooding of the dock and the third big action sequences is the
final charnier chase. As you would expect from director John
Frankenheimer, the action is well staged and brilliantly shot. The
final chase even employs a first person perspective angle at times,
like the new Hardcore Henry film that's currently in cinemas, but
this was 1975, Go-Pro cameras didn't exist back then so they would
have had to strap a small 8mm camera to Hackman for those shots but
the editing on the chase is absolutely faultless.
Having
not seen the film before and hearing that there was a tense chase at
the end, I assumed we'd be seeing cars zooming around the streets of
Marseilles with this being a Frankenheimer film but alas no, we get a
tense foot chase. Luckily Frankenheimer gave us his French set car
chases in the utterly brilliant and hugely underrated action film,
Ronin. While the film is brilliantly shot and directed, it lacks the
grit and guerilla approach that Friedkin brought to the first film,
but I suppose it would be very difficult to make Marseilles look
gritty.
The
performances are all fantastic, Fernando Rey returning as Alain
Charnier is charismatic but ultimately fiendish and a master criminal
but at the end during the chase, he seems to be scared for his life.
A good performance. Bernard Fresson gives a good performance as Henri
Barthelemy, Doyle's French counterpart, a man who plays by the book
for the most part but knows Doyle is a man who gets results and
eventually the two become allies with Barthelemy taking on some, not
a lot, but some of Doyle's traits. The film however truly belongs to
Hackman, the man is a legitimate legend, be it playing the commander
of Sub or the corrupt mayor of western town, he's always giving 110%,
I can never fault the man's ability as an actor, which is a shame as
he's now retired. The film gives Hackman a chance to play something
he'd never played before, an addict. Watching his deterioration from
take charge cop to screwed up junkie and then him getting clean is
absolutely riveting to watch. One scene where he's drinking in a cell
with Fresson and he's explaining baseball players while getting
progressively drunk to the point where he just comes out with a
tirade of how much he hates drugs, what they've done, what they've
done to him and how he's helpless to stop it is just grade A acting.
Like
I pointed out, the film has some flaws, the pacing is a little off
and could've done with some minutes trimmed and it would have been
cool to see some cars zooming through the streets of Marseilles but
all in all it's a pretty good follow up to the Oscar winning
original. I'm surprised Hackman wasn't nominated for an Oscar for his
performance in this one. I really enjoyed it and I could easily find
myself revisiting this film again and again.
Rating : 4.0
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