Truands

Paris Lockdown: this one-man army of a wet paper bag of poor excuses of a wannabe gangster film, this is as empty as a crêpe Suzette in a nunnery on a Sunday morning. As rich as poor taste goes, yes there's boobs, bottoms and nodding heads galore but takeaway the sleaze, the flying bullets and the flash cars then all we have done is landed on the square that tells us to "Go Back To GO, do not collect £200...start again".

This is as deep and meaningful as gutters will allow it to rise, while an insight of Parisian lowlife drug smugglers, pimps and killers, there is just nothing to add to the narrative. Nothing. The characters are living the life of a one-dimensional caricature. We are given a so-called gang leader who simply is not memorable, and his pet dogs are just as easily put-down and unmissable as the whole sorry affair.

The entire episode here seems too have been pulled out of any sequence in their life, it is a Soap Opera of blood and thugs. This is a basic rise and fall of a Paris crime boss who lives his life whoring, shooting and, again, shooting. The development of these people is as far as your next bus stop to Plainville, even the Robert De Niro look-alike and his greased-up hair looks too pastiche, too…already done.

Frédéric Schoendoerffer, director, has placed the action in the seedy side of town, the bars, strip joints and night filled streets of Paris, France, Europe and to be fair, any self respecting Parisian gangster seeing this sad debunkle would be, allegedly, embarrassed.

With just a touch of bewilderment, this crime-caper has no direction apart from up. It is not a poorly made film, it's, forgive the pun, executed well, nice offensive language, great looking girls and mean mothers' doing their job, only too well. Some nice, forgive the pun, once more, location shots and bad attitudes, the odd torture sequence, done very nicely too, ouch. However, it is the putting together of this work that to make any coherent sense a plot, let alone a sub-plot would have been acceptable.

These guys are hard-core but when the spotlight of the good-cop, bad-cop is shining on their sorry backside, it is the whole main feature that will give the game away and get you busted, sent-down and sent to solitary

I enjoyed watching this film. Powerful acting from the cast and specially from "Philippe Caubère". I hope he does more films in the future in the "crime" category. I would cast him as the villain, bad guy anytime : )

I don't understand the negative reviews not finding a storyline here :) A good film needs to have your attention for its duration, and believe me this film does that.

I'm from LA, the movie capital of the world. Nowadays films are made by the kilo here :) but there is no quality. Give me a dozen "Truands" per year and I'd be a happy audience!!

To start of with, this film no fun ride, nothing glossy or Hollywood like happy endings bull.. It's hard as nails, nihilistic and pretty gutwrenching. It also comes over as very realistic.

The director also had a big hand in the (later) great French cop-series "Braquo" which is also excellent and very tough, and this has the same style.

Sure, it may lack story, I would say it's almost like watching a documentary: a day in the life of... But the happenings that unfold are told with so much vigour and relentlessness (is that a word?) that they kept me glued to the screen the whole 107 min.

Always on the lookout for anything this raw and another reviewer compared it with another French jewel "Dobermann" which as you will understand I absolutely adore as well. But the two are not at all comparable. They are in fact worlds apart with "Dobermann" being a comic-book like eurotrash/punk action adventure and this a slick slice of painful underworld realism.

Absolutely stunning 9/10

I just don't understand... Where is the story, where are the characters ? Well, this is a strange movie. I'm still wondering whether is was good or not... This could have been a classic but the characters are so flat: They all live for the same things (i.e. drugs, alcohol, money and Hungarian whores) they get doing some "business". None of the characters seems to have something unique or original. The story is really completing this. Whith no-personality-characters you get a no-personality-story or just a no-thing. On the other hand if you really haven't got anything to do today. Just go. There is a lot of dumb mafia guys shootin' and drinking all film long. Really interesting ;-) Fortunately I didn't pay for the cinema so I can't regret it !

A French gangster film set in Paris with a very thin plot, lots of blood & gore, little or no character studies or plot lines, violent misogynist sex. I kept watching this and waiting for a plot to emerge. It didn't happen. The film starts with episodes of the various factions or gangs involved. One gang member is imprisoned. From then the film simply becomes a series of killings and murders until few of them are left. Reservoir Dogs it is not. Meserine it is not. Ronin it is not. The screenplay appears merely to be a pastiche of the best and worst of American gangster genre. The characters here are portrayed as cold violent individuals. Some characters have no apparent place within a thin plot - just filling up road kill. All this violent mayhem in a capital city and not a single policeman in sight? I found this film to be without much merit and not one that I would watch again, or indeed recommend.