Imagine you have a fine cast, an interesting crime story, a great location - Nice, the "capital" of the French Riviera - and, last but not least, Ennio Morricone to score the whole lot. How can you possibly botch it? Well the opening credits give you the answer with a very shaky, ill-framed helicopter shot of the Riviera around Nice. It takes a bad director to request this kind of (costly) shot and not make sure it will be good. It takes a very bad director to accept such poor images into the final cut - the simple thought of the contrast between the wonderful landscape and the horrendous camera work still makes me ill at ease. A hackneyed postcard montage would have been better.
Do I really need to elaborate on all the ugly work a very bad director can do? Just watch his cameo (67min into the movie), and see for yourself how pretentious the guy looks. Basically the choice to over-edit the script fatally leads to a boring editing where scenes are just put together in line. No consistent inner rhythm can result from such a lazy approach to film-making. Nothing builds up, and worst of all, the script falls apart by giving you the answer way before the end.
Actually, more than 20 minutes before the ending, all of a sudden, we are explained the mysterious link between the murders, something that occurred 8 years before. It soon becomes obvious what is the motive for this shooting spree, but it takes the bright head detective a very long time to close the now ludicrous investigation: with or without a lead the Police doesn't know what to do.
Sans mobile apparent - An Elusive Motive - is so bad that nobody is able to shine. For Trintignant, the only consistent character trait is that he always wash his hands (must be some kind of powerful biblical reference) and Jean-Pierre Marielle is either miscast or awfully misdirected. Even Morricone's interesting score gets tedious after it has been looped in so many times to help fill in all the emotional blanks.
Philippe Labro made half a dozen movies. A couple are acceptable pot-boilers, but in every one the pretentious writer-songwriter-director-journalist cannot refrain from overloading the buffer of his poor cinema skills. Yet, as far as I can remember, he never came close to making such a gigantic dud: here he simply misses every mark.
Do I really need to elaborate on all the ugly work a very bad director can do? Just watch his cameo (67min into the movie), and see for yourself how pretentious the guy looks. Basically the choice to over-edit the script fatally leads to a boring editing where scenes are just put together in line. No consistent inner rhythm can result from such a lazy approach to film-making. Nothing builds up, and worst of all, the script falls apart by giving you the answer way before the end.
Actually, more than 20 minutes before the ending, all of a sudden, we are explained the mysterious link between the murders, something that occurred 8 years before. It soon becomes obvious what is the motive for this shooting spree, but it takes the bright head detective a very long time to close the now ludicrous investigation: with or without a lead the Police doesn't know what to do.
Sans mobile apparent - An Elusive Motive - is so bad that nobody is able to shine. For Trintignant, the only consistent character trait is that he always wash his hands (must be some kind of powerful biblical reference) and Jean-Pierre Marielle is either miscast or awfully misdirected. Even Morricone's interesting score gets tedious after it has been looped in so many times to help fill in all the emotional blanks.
Philippe Labro made half a dozen movies. A couple are acceptable pot-boilers, but in every one the pretentious writer-songwriter-director-journalist cannot refrain from overloading the buffer of his poor cinema skills. Yet, as far as I can remember, he never came close to making such a gigantic dud: here he simply misses every mark.