UnknownDoomer

"If you're waiting for me to tell you to leave without me, you've been watching too many movies.".

An insurance agent named Barry wastes his days in an inconspicuous office. Day and night have long since merged into one for him, and life consists only of the hateful routine and melancholic conversations with his ex-wife. One day, his superiors send him a seemingly trivial request - to fill out a paper from an elderly teacher in an evening, which promises a pretty good commission. Barry turns out to be so burdened by the surrounding grayness, on the one hand, and so absorbed in the proposed plan, that he does not pay attention to the fact that the potential client lives in a ghetto, where the police do not go, where the phones do not work and which is completely controlled by gangs of various kinds. One of the latter, in this case the key one for the given canvas, is something like a cross between a dark cult and street elements, and an unbalanced idol is placed at its head.

At first, everything goes quite ordinary, exactly until the hero makes a fatal mistake, which, in his understanding, converges on a flashy and insignificant trifle, but not in the morals of the local punks, which serves as a characteristic hook in such cases in order to play out this or that scenario with a Harvard University graduate who suddenly turns up. The further course of events grows like a snowball, the degree of trouble increases more and more, and the original tempting thought goes far into the background - the key question now becomes how to get out of the concrete jungle, which is so easy to get into, but from which it is sometimes so difficult to get out.

The typical setting of dirty streets of forgotten neighborhoods of the 1980s, symbols and attributes, as well as situational stories of local residents, those elements that could be observed in a scattering of other films, are supplemented here by several interesting components. The main ones include the following:

* Almost all the action takes place in one high-rise mansion and its narrow corridors.

* As the time moves, some of the local (and not so local) residents will be imbued with pity and play their role in the twisted story, including the granddaughter of the aforementioned teacher and a somewhat psychopathic veteran of the Vietnam War.

* By the end of the play, the hero will have managed to go from a person lost in life to a cynic looking at things with black humor.

* Tony Todd and Stacey Dash were noted here in some of their earliest roles.

If you don't take into account the rough edges and some cheapness typical for a B-movie action thriller, then the impression of this, in its own way, well-tailored work is spoiled by a rather blurry and abrupt epilogue.

Probably one of the best, and at the same time the most laconic, roles of Alain Delon. The atmosphere and style of Paris in the heyday of the 1960s, noisy and not so noisy streets, hurried and not quite residents of the French capital, busy with their daily affairs. The familiar world. A world that is completely alien to the ascetic protagonist and who, in his own way, following a once spontaneously invented quote, lives in the deep shadow of the urban jungle. He is a cold-blooded hired killer with an icy look, who does not ask questions, an «impersonal tool» with a foggy past.

At first glance the story being told does not stand out with anything special and is built around another order received by the protagonist and various subsequent spontaneous twists and turns associated with it. A random witness, an inconclusive interrogation by the police, hesitant customers, situational chases and, as a classic, but in its own way wrapped attribute of the genre - a femme fatale. From different angles, similar, near-detective themes were raised in various films, to which the terms "noir" or «suspense» are usually attached; decades later, it would be developed in the now cult «Leon» (1994) and the art-house «Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai» (1999), which in its own way plays on the «samurai aesthetics». At the same time there is one distinctive component that perhaps no other work has managed to convey to such an extent - abstract principles are multiplied by absolute detachment.

In Besson's film the hero was generally lonely by nature, but on occasion he could exchange a few words and establish some kind of communication. Jarmusch's work played out life's drama and its consequences in a unique way. In Godard's somewhat pretentious «Alphaville» (1965) philosophical questions were raised and Monsieur Kouchen, although a bit strange, was not devoid of emotion and a peculiar sense of humor. Jeff Costello does not fit into this series, nor into any other. For him life, whether his or someone else's, is just an abstract, mechanical sequence of actions, a path from point A to point B, following a planned course of action and instructions, without raising questions like «Where?», «What?» «Why?». This aspect runs through the entire plot like a thin thread.

At the same time no matter how good this or that «mechanism» is one day it can fail, which is essentially what happens - the ace of his specific business begins to make one fatal mistake after another, raising the stakes and, as a result, the police's chances of catching him, but he does not attach any special significance to it. The general detachment gradually moves to the next and now essentially the last iteration - consciously or not the hero begins to strive for an exit. An exit that on a subconscious level becomes for him an identification with the seemingly familiar, but now perceived in a different key, word «death». And now it seems like nothing, including a laconic friend or a canary, which was either a kind of souvenir or one of the few joys of life, or just another allegory.

Everyone, one way or another, will find their own answers and interpretations here, and, in my opinion, it is this component, combined with a minimal amount of action and the prevailing silence in the frame, that allowed this film to become a classic of the genre.

One day the measured everyday life of a girl working as a journalist in one of the publishing houses is interrupted by a strange call. For some obscure reason, she, without any ulterior motive, takes the stranger for her friend, with whom she has a rather contradictory relationship. Starting from this, at first glance, insignificant detail, the further cycle of events begins. At the insistence of the caller she arrives at a nearby bar and becomes a witness to a spontaneous murder. Then there is a generally typical set for any simple thriller - a corrupt policeman, dark streets of an average city somewhere in the USA, a friend who will always give a couple of useful (and not so useful) pieces of advice, indifferent colleagues, as well as a couple of moderately colorful criminal elements. In essence could have finished here, but some components of this picture taken separately allow it to stand out a little against the background of numerous, often completely faceless, brothers in the genre, which especially gained popularity in the second half of the eighties and the following nineties of the twentieth century.

Probably everyone knows the combination of good cop - bad cop. Here is a more unusual layout using the example of the «other side of the barricades». The first figure is the melancholic, taciturn and thoughtful Stephen McHattie, who dyed his hair a slightly acid-blond color. The second is an unbalanced psychopath in a leather jacket, occasionally (and without) waving a switchblade and wearing slicked-back hair, aka Steve Buscemi in one of his early roles, several years before Tarantino's creation, which made him famous to a certain extent. This explosive combination of incompatible opposites needs to find the wayward person at all costs, not without difficulty maneuvering in the discrepancies between plans and approaches to solving this, as it turns out later, not the easiest task.

In addition, as the action progresses, the three main characters mentioned will continue to be accompanied by a mysterious lover of frank conversations, the final alignment with whom will be revealed from an unusual side only closer to the end, as well as, acting as a kind of separate actor, the brick gateways of New York.

As a result it can be noted that watching the twists and turns of all the mentioned elements turns out to be quite interesting, therefore a positive review and a rating relevant to the genre specifics of category "B" thrillers.