Le premier cercle

I love Jean Reno (Leon: The Professional, Godzilla, Ronin, The Crimson Rivers). That may color my impression of the film as a whole. He plays an Armenian mafia head in France. He is cool, tough, and everything I have always loved about his acting.

Gaspar Ulliel (A Very Long Engagement) plays his son, Anton. Anton wants out of the mob and wants to live a normal life with his love Elodie, played by Vahina Giocante (Lila Says).

Sami Bouajila (Days of Glory, The Siege) is Saunier, the police inspector trying to catch the gang as they plan one last heist that will set them up for life.

Director Laurent Tuel did not waste a second in this dark film. It was captivating from beginning to end, even if it turned out as expected. The soundtrack was excellent. It was worth watching just to hear it.

...where the other reviewers watching? I don't write reviews very often. Most of the time I do it to do justice. To set all those reviews from a parallel dimension straight.

Inner Ring is not a good movie. It is not resourceful, the ending is not surprising and neither Reno, nor Ulliel have delivered their best performances here.

The character development in this movie is so bad, it will make you cringe. As is the storytelling. I am beginning to suspect that this is a French thing, as I have seen it before. Scenes are cut together, seemingly at random. No segways, no connection to other scenes. There are apparently huge leaps in time that the viewer is completely unaware of, until a scene just doesn't make any sense. You will think "Oh, I guess some months went by" and maybe even shrug your shoulders. And slowly you will begin to lose interest in this movie. The characters apparently develop off-screen. Which is a bad thing, because this is a friggin' movie! You are supposed to see what is going on. So the audience can build a relationship with the characters. This movie fails in doing so.

I conclude with the plead to look at the overall rating, which is not very good. Please, don't believe any review that rates this movie higher than 5.

Although I mainly watch American films, I make a point of watching foreign films every so often for variety and to see a genre possibly done in a different way. When I saw this at the video store, I thought: "Cool! Jean Reno is a colorful actor, and the video box art and the title of the movie suggest that this will be jam-packed with action and suspense!" I rented it, took it home... and I was very disappointed. I could make a long list about everything that disappointed me about this movie. For starters, Jean Reno is in less of the movie than you might think. And as for action, there is almost no action in the entire running time! Still, the movie could have worked by showing us interesting drama or colorful and interesting other characters. But that's not what happens. The plot is VERY slow-moving, with a lot of boring chat that doesn't advance things very much. And the movie looks and sounds weird; the cinematography has a soft, washed-out look you often see in French movies, and the audio doesn't crackle with life (such as the fact that scene after scene goes by with no musical score in the background.) In fact, the movie has more of a made-for-TV feel than a theatrical film feeling.

I'll still take a chance on foreign films in the future, whether they are French or not. But I'll be more careful in my selections. I now know that foreign film companies can be like American film companies, promising something but delivering something else - and that "something else" not being very good at all.

This movie could have been so much better. The cast, the location, even the plot (thin as it was) was good. Especially the cast. I expect great things of Jean Reno. Perhaps the budget caused the director to pinch things.

I did like the homage to The Godfather with the scene following where the grocery bag falls to the pavement. Nice touch.

There could have been so much more, but the movie felt hollow. The actual heist itself seemed to me almost an afterthought. Such a pity, because the drama could really have been built there step by step, scene by scene. I kept waiting for the payoff. Frankly, I was confused at which player took the bullet until the denouement. The last third of the movie was muddy, or perhaps 'smoky'.

I really wish that I could rank this movie higher than I did, but that's show biz, I guess.

A hard-boiled, slickly entertainingly, bullet-paced Policier about an infamous Armenian crime family ruthlessly headed by powerful boss, Milo Malakian (Jean Reno). His rebellious, altogether less bloodthirsty son, Anton (Gaspard Ulliel) secretly wants out, enjoy some bucolic domesticity with his lava hot nurse fiancee, Elodie (Vahina Giocante). Needless to say his son's imminent defection, ever mounting paranoia, and the relentless hounding by vengeful L'inspecteur Saunier (Sami Bouajila) bodes ill for the fractured Malakian clan! While formulaic, the action is dynamically mounted, performances are uniformly credible, Alain Kremski's lyrical piano score is a delight, and the terse, volatile atmosphere is frequently redolent of a vintage Lenzi Polizioteschi! Laurent Tuel's consistently gripping 'Le Premier Cercle' is an above average Euro-crime thriller that, sadly, seems to have been overlooked. The desperate airplane heist is genuinely thrilling, and Jean Reno fans are in for a real treat. If 'Le Premier Cercle' had been shot in the late 60s, I could readily see, Alain Delon as Anton, and burly Lino Ventura as Milo!