XoWizIama Excellent adaptation.

Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life

MusicChat It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

a_fry Does anyone know if the dog death scene was live (actual) footage of a dog being gassed or was that dog an amazing actor? I cannot find any information on this, and it was suggested in a previous comment that the dog death scene was actual terrorist footage. It would upset me to think that animal cruelty / the portrayal of terrorists performing animal cruelty is something that Canadian film distribution companies find it okay to support even if the film isn't made in Canada. The film centers on a very touchy subject, but that scene is not one I am going to forget easily. I found this just another example of horrific things accomplished by terrorists in the world, and replaying it whether in a film or on television just amplifies the effect they wish to portray to us "infidels".

AndreHeeger The filmmaker Philippe Haim obviously likes Ridley and Tony Scott and with Secret Defense he delivers a nice try. The problem: he keeps too much to the surface.Secret Defense has the pace of a Tony Scott production but lacks the depth of character of other movies in the genre like f.e. Syriana. Recruiting a prostitute/student and turning her into a top agent in a matter of (movie) minutes takes some skills. Vahina Giocante sure is pretty (and she was perfect in Lila Dit Ca) but she never gets the chance to deliver a convincing personality (nor do most of the other actors). Half an hour more would have helped the story a lot. The question of course remains: would Haim have been able to fill it accordingly?But its not just that. The story is too flat, has too many clichés chasing each other and most characters are mainly one dimensional.Which doesn't mean Secret Defense doesn't deliver. If you like your spy stories to be more like action movies you're in for a treat. A touch of Bourne and Bruce Willis, a bomb here, a sexy agent there. Not bad at all. Just nothing like the real thing.

robert-temple-1 It makes a difference to see it from the French point of view. After all, ten percent of the population of France are now refugees or descendants of refugees from Muslim North Africa. This film is about the French Secret Service, which has initials I can never remember, but you know the one. It portrays them as hyper-efficient, hyper-modern, ruthless and dedicated professionals who will, as Gérard Lanvin the lead actor puts it in the film, be 'patriots' who will 'do anything for my country'. And 'anything' really means, unfortunately, 'anything'. The film portrays in grim, horrifying, and fascinating detail the fantastic entrapments devised to recruit young agents in the fight against Muslim terrorism. The French call the Qaeda fanatics by their alternative name of 'Salafis' rather than 'Wahabbis'. The terrorists are portrayed in 'Damascus' and 'Afghanistan' (both actually filmed in Morocco) with extreme and convincing realism. The film is disturbing in many places, with one homosexual rape scene and several murders. I believe the horrifying footage of the dog in the glass cage who is killed by cyanide gas is a real Qaeda video. The set-ups carried out by the French secret service are so devious that they would make Machiavelli blush. The film does not have the Hollywood approach to violence, which always focuses on childish and adolescent fantasies of things crashing and exploding. Instead, the French, who are a far more sophisticated people, concentrate on what happens to people rather than the havoc wreaked to mere objects. In this, they are more straightforward. If a severed head has to be delivered in a cake box, it is delivered in a mundane ordinary manner, and it does not have to be delivered by a helicopter smashing into a skyscraper. Anyway, there are few skyscrapers in Paris, thank God. (Skyscrapers have no business existing anywhere other than New York and Shanghai.) The attitude towards the agent ('humint' to the Americans) is brazenly unfeeling. As Lanvin says: 'An agent is not a person, he is a tool.' Controllers are not allowed to treat their agents as human beings. The film features an astonishingly versatile performance by the young actress Vahina Giocante, who is tricked into becoming an agent, and who screams at Lanvin when she realizes what he has done to her that he is 'all alone'. He answers with resignation: 'Yes, I know.' The whole story is very bleak, that is, when it stops its restless pace of action long enough to allow anyone a moment to reflect. The film is really a most impressive achievement, exciting, well made, relentlessly entertaining, if you have the stomach for the grisly bits. The director, Philippe Haïm, who also wrote the story, appears from his name to be of North African descent, so perhaps he has a special feel for all of this. He has done a superb job of making a French 'blockbuster'

GUENOT PHILIPPE That's the most wonderful and convincing film ever made about french Intelligence Services - DGSE - the equivalent of the CIA, MI 6 or MOSSAD. A rough, sharp, accurate and awful programmer which tells the story of ordinary people who are manipulated by their own "managers" in order to become decoy themselves. Before being wasted, in the name of the National Security.It made me puke. But so realistic.Lanvin is terrific as a cold blooded, ruthless supervisor who doesn't hesitate to sacrifice his own recruits, the rookies. As his character says in the movie: "Agents are not human beings but weapons..."No comment.Simon Abkarian is also delightful as a machiavellian terrorist. In this film, many things are revealed about Intellingence horrible proceedings, as well as terrorists networks.It's the first movie made about that subject since Frederic Schoenderffer's AGANTS SECRETS, in 2004.