To me, this movie is perfection.

Simply Perfect

Best movie ever!

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

Stereotypical drunk cop protagonist. Except this one is REALLY REALLY drunk.A lot of dark, beautiful scenes around Paris and decent yet generic dark crime dialog - this film starts getting questionable when the antagonist commits a murder while in jail after already serving a life sentence and just days after his parole hearing. Yes, after a man is found hanging in a cell that he just basically randomly was placed into - he gets set free - and he just committed murder and rape about 20 years ago and has rape and other violent crimes on his record from previous cases and stints in jail.Around the same time of the parole hearing the viewer is introduced into another "twist". What is it? Yes corruption in the police force. But this isn't with basic under-payed patrol cops - its with the elite special crimes unit in which the protagonist is a part of. This corruption isn't anything high brow and isn't even white collar crime - it's some fat guy crime scene photographer who steals jewelry off dead corpses and - get this - sells them to fellow special crime detectives on his police force.This movie had potential (the first scene was pretty iconic) but then went nowhere for literally hours and had some unreal corny movie scenes that you might see in a movie from the 80's and then of coarse a goofy tedious plot which left me confused about the point of the movie.

This one's just as bad as the director's previous movie.Full of fake gravitas, hollow posturing, stupid behaviour, self-important bleak pseudo-philosophizing, contrived storytelling and unbelievable character development. Not to mention the many piled-up clichés.A policeman's life may be hell on earth, but this pic offers just superficial and wound-up theatrics without any feeling for real-life matters of detection and police work, let alone sincere emotions.And as an entertaining psycho-thriller "Seven" style it doesn't work either.3 out of 10 dead owner's pets

This is a harrowing French police and crime drama directed by Olivier Marchal, who seems to do rather a lot of police films and TV. It features Daniel Auteuil as you may never have seen him before, looking like a drunken wreck of a man, unshaven and unwashed, though I have to say that Auteuil's rather thin weasly face looks better, in my opinion, with a modest beard. Auteuil is a very fine actor, and he conveys his character perfectly, though he is far from being a role model, as he gulps down neat whiskey a bottle at a time and is a very far gone alcoholic in this film. It is suggested that he was driven to this by despair at the death of his little girl and the paralysis and vegetative state of his wife as a result of a car crash, the flashes of which we see haunting him throughout this film. Despite his condition, he is kept on as a crack detective in the Paris homicide squad. His struggles to catch a serial killer of women are shown in parallel with another story which eventually dovetails with the main story. The subplot, which in the end turns out to be the main plot, involves another serial killer who after many years in prison is about to be released. Auteuil had originally found and arrested him years before. A little girl had who had watched her mother being murdered by this man has now grown up and is a very attractive but psychologically damaged young woman, effectively played by Olivia Bonamy, who looks much younger than she really is and has a deep, meditative, and intense gaze and plenty of cinematic appeal. It s inevitable that Bonamy will turn to Auteuil for help and protection when the vicious killer is released, and he indeed does start stalking Bonamy. The underlying themes of the film are the inadequacy of the French justice system, the corrupting forces of liberalism in the face of crime, and that main theme of all serious French cinema these days, the complete, total, and stifling corruption of the French Establishment, which covers up all crimes which have connection whatever with important people. We see film and film coming out of France with this theme, and we must conclude that all those filmmakers are trying to tell us something. But I don't believe anybody in the world can now doubt the truth of it, since the revelations years ago of the truth about Mr. Number One Hypocrite, Francois Mitterand, who turned out to be a Vichy official posing as a socialist and who used the French security services to pursue his erotic obsession with Carol Bouquet by bugging her flat. It seems that the French are seething with resentment at their elites, and maybe les enfants de la Patrie will rise again, so extreme seems to be their hatred of their own masters these days, as films like this convey it. It is a pity that the French do not drink proper tea, or they could have a French Tea Party Movement. They could always set up a Tisane Party Movement, but it doesn't have quite the same ring to it. One quibble about this intense and brilliantly made film, about from its violence and gruesomeness of course, and it is this: could we please have just one director of a police film anywhere in America, Britain, or France, who would stop spending so much time in the morgue looking at all the corpses? It really is disgusting. The whole cinematic industry seems to be on a necrophilia binge. Get over it! OK, so it may mean putting a small industry of corpse fabricators out of work and increase the unemployment rate, but they can always find work in an undertaker's establishment, and there is no need to ply their trade on screen like that. I really have seen enough burnt and mutilated corpses with bullet holes, oozing wounds, missing bits and pieces, and blood all over them, and wish to see no more, thank you. This film has an alternative title of MR73, and for those who wonder what that is, it is the name of a very expensive and custom-made revolver which one of the policeman has collected, keeps in a special box, and says 'is more beautiful than a woman'. It ends up being used, naturally, but not in a way which is at all beautiful.

Directed by ex-cop Olivier Marchal as the concluding part of the trilogy he started with the critically acclaimed GANGSTERS and 36 QUAI DES ORFEVRES, this promised to be an inside look at the French police system. At least, that's all I knew when I entered the theater, lured in by the presence of the ever dependable Daniel Auteuil who may have compiled the most impressive body of work this side of Depardieu. Had I known beforehand just how relentlessly downbeat a cinematic experience this was going to be, it might have scared me off and that would have been very much my loss… Set in the coastal town of Marseilles, made to look extremely uninviting by the bleached out cinematography of Denis Rouden (a master of atmosphere, as evidenced by his sterling work on Lionel Delplanque's PROMENONS-NOUS DANS LES BOIS and Olivier Megaton's LA SIRENE ROUGE), the narrative incorporates two serial killers – one past, one present – and their influence on weary, dead-eyed cop Louis Schneider in charge (initially, at least) of both cases. Those expecting a Continental carbon copy of SE7EN however will be disappointed (additional comments prove as much) as this is basically background for Schneider's road to redemption. Careful viewer attention is mandatory to grasp matters that have occurred in the past – sometimes only visually alluded to rather than spelled out in dialog – and how they not so much influence as downright paralyze the character in the present. Suffice it to say that a furtive fling with co-worker Marie (a subtle portrayal by the hauntingly beautiful Catherine Marchal, hereto best known for extensive TV work) at the exact same time his wife crashed her car on the freeway, reducing her to vegetable and killing their only child, provided him with enough guilt for at least three lifetimes. While his reprehensible and morally corrupt superior Kovalski, played with hiss-able relish by Francis Renaud, works hard to take Schneider of the current murder case, an unwelcome blast from the past will put everything into perspective. After 25 years of incarceration, psychopath Charles Subra (craggy-faced Philippe Nahon in his best performance since Gaspar Noë's SEUL CONTRE TOUS) is about to be released on good behavior, upsetting troubled bartender Justine (gorgeous Olivia Bonamy, unforgettable in the out of left field horror hit ILS, who continues to impress more with each passing film) whose parents he slaughtered before her very eyes. Requiring Schneider's help in bringing the seemingly reformed murderer (who has "found God") to justice, she unwittingly helps pave the way for the demon-plagued policeman to make his peace with the past. Fundamentally decent, he eventually summons up the courage to do the right things, even as rampant corruption and random violence threaten to obliterate his valiant efforts.With human kindness in such short supply, Marchal still allows for a single ray of hope to shine through at film's end. The fact that he accomplishes this through possibly the most hackneyed of narrative devices (the birth of a baby) and yet manages not to make it come off as such attests to his considerable talents as both filmmaker and story-teller as well as the profound emotional investment audiences have established by then with these emotionally battered characters. The exquisitely elegiac soundtrack by Bruno Coulais, who has clearly been going from strength to strength, beautifully complements the human and religious connotations the movie has built towards. Viewers who complained about the perfunctory exposition in both murder cases actually managed to miss the point the director has gone to such great lengths to make, that even the most adverse of situations can serve to bring out the best in people if this is within their nature, ofttimes unbeknown to even themselves. Though on the surface as noir as noir can be, this may ultimately prove an optimist opus at heart. Just brace yourself passing through. There is light at tunnel's end