Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

newjersian This movie is an absolute garbage. The story is implausible, the filming is bad, and the actors look like they are playing some stage drama in a high school. Even the usually impressive Daniel Auteuil gets lost in this story. The pace in this film is very slow, and when actors have nothing to play, they lite up a cigarette. Probably the tobacco used in this movie consumed most of its budget. Do people of France really poison their lungs so much, or the director of MR73 wanted to just show us the masculinity of his heroes? Finally, the amateurish symbolism of several scenes is just a bunch of clichés that were used in so many movies before. Instead of being dramatic, they are just laughable. Bad movie,2 out of 10.

robert-temple-1 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.

R. Ignacio Litardo First of all: I didn't really like this movie, and I wanted to.Daniel Auteuil, the genre, a serial... But no, when I saw the clichés piling up it reminded me of another French tank policier which turned out to be pulp... yes, "36 Quai des Orfebrès". Luckily I hadn't found out on IMDb that they were issued by the same director. If "real life cop experience" makes you put a wife left in coma from "an accident", a child victim from a family murderer, who cries all the time (sometimes flooding) is herself a victim of a bad job, bad relationships with her boyfriend and sister, wait until you see his grandfather die (she sobs again), all her pregnancy, including two stressful events, then childbearing, on camera, long shots of her sweating, then the child's face on camera... What does it have to do with the story? Do we need this to elicit some automatic empathy for any character? If we want to watch a silly sick movie like "Mr. Holland's Opus", which can only resort to low blows because it has nothing to say, go ahead. But this film could have been good. It should have been great.It's a pity, Marchal's got a great CV as an actor (!) as well as a writer and director. I just don't like his way of "emotional blackmail", that the Argentine writer J. L. Borges wrote about 50 years ago. He liked the genre, I suspect he wouldn't like this tergiversation.I've just learned this is the last part of a trilogy, starting with "Gangsers" (2002), then followed by 36 Quai des Orfèvres (nothing to do with the 1947 movie, that was way more daring for its age). Any of the 3 has actors that would make any budding director dream: grouchy Gérard, André Dussollier, Anne Parillaud, Francis Renaud and Olivia Bonamy here. He is very believable (something of Madeleine R. IMDb readers?) . She could make a rock weep. Here she is given such lame material that it only hints at what she could do. Like the "motive" for her to want to track Charles Subra. "Ask him if he had changed". Come' on...! He killed her family, but did his time (= in jail) as a law abiding citizen, but now he's free, we secretly want him killed, and so does she. If not, why ask him with a dishonest kiss to "find him"? If everybody knows he's a loose cannon? But she's got to remain "purely good". Then, she's got to babble something ludicrous as her leitmotif? The problem is that it's the core of this bad movie. Ah, the cliché of "the woman who could be his daughter that puts some order and romance into a loner looser with addiction(s) isn't something you've seen a million times? Again, superb IMDb community of reviewers, help me out with names commenting this review, in your own, add a thread or something. I just don't want to write this review. The only scene I liked was the predictable dog accident with his sidekick. Schneider seems really angry, like if nothing he does could ever turn right. Auteuil has to overact all his other "anger scenes" so as to carry on with this boring film. Like the "botched And at the morgue" scene, the fight with Kovalski, his constant drunkenness, etc. At Quai he's also got to endure jail, unfair condemnation even from his family, bereavement (sounds familiar :)?). Even the filming style here of the melodramatic scenes is the same. In fact, that's what made me think I had seen the same film before... it was Quai :(! Music is good when playing the obsessive tune Schneider gets on his head. Kovalski gets the best line, the good if not superb: "cops are like family, we don't betray each other" (to the fat forensic/ photographer, smuggler). Now that I think about it, I'm surprised he didn't wind up dead. I also liked Subra's pretence of redemption, totally feigned convincingly, so much he fools Kovalski. Which is not so surprising given he fits the profile of the classic psychopath. Emmanuel Carrière in the book that originated the infinitely better "L'Adversaire" (also starring Auteuil) narrates how the true case of a guy who murdered basically all his family, including parents and in laws, even almost got rid of her lover too, all during a long period (not in a fit or rage or something), later in jail converted to extreme religious zeal. Sounds familiar, right?Catherine Marchal does a fine emphatic psychologist. Yes, she's smart and beautiful (her sleek attire and ultra stylish car does help), but doesn't she have the same surname as the director? Oh my.I liked the lighting. All the whites are too white, blinding. "Saturating" or whatever is the jargon for that. I suppose it follows some esthetical motivation, all I can say is it added some mysticism sorely wanting in the film. What I mean is, photography is probably the best this movie has. Even Subra in jail, washing or being put back into prison make you feel trapped, like if you were really there, grey walls, into constant "greyness".Watch this film, don't get me wrong. The ending is worth it. But don't harbour great expectations, and you won't be disappointed. Like most things in life, I guess :).

Whadever This movie should not be rated for its plot, or the good guys vs bad guys, or any other standard used to rate normal movies. This movie is an homage. An homage to the suffering, the courage and the lives of the real people on which the story is based.Every aspect of this film breathes with the same deep respect for what happened. The reality it brings into the room takes your breath away... You cannot watch this movie and escape its grasp.Daniel Auteuil and everyone else in the cast did their jobs with dignity. They played their roles the way they should be played and the aftertaste is bitter... but filled with reverence.Watch this movie without reading the plot. Let it happen to you, expect nothing and allow yourself to care.I'm sure you'll agree; 10 out of 10. Easily.