In this brutal, French crime-thriller, Parisian hitmen Franck (Benoît Magimel) and Jean-Guy (Olivier Marchal) work for gang lord Claude Corti (Philippe Caubère). A steely-eyed operator, Claude keeps a tight hold over the local drugs and prostitution rackets aided by his coterie of suave thugs, including Muslim cousins Hicham (Mehdi Nebbou) and Larbi (Tomer Sisley). However, when Claude brutalizes their cousin Johnny (Ichem Saibi) over an unpaid debt, they turn him in to the police. With Claude jailed for three years, the cousins seize control over his crumbling empire and when he is set for release, issue a contract on his life. Ever pragmatic, Franck offers to kill Claude himself…
Paris Lockdown takes the Michael Mann approach to crime thrillers as character study, depicting a neon-lit, urban jungle prowled by world-weary gangsters in GQ fashions. Style conscious thugs talk of loyalty and honour, constantly boast about their sexual prowess, passing beautiful women around like currency and indulging designer violence. Taut direction ratchets the tension through a dense, meandering plot punctuated by gory shootouts and a gruesome torture scene where Claude takes a power drill to a naked prisoner, then rips an eyeball out for an encore. Unfolding layers of double-cross and counterplots hold the interest, but the morass of identikit gangsters are hard to tell apart. More damagingly, co-writer/director Frédérick Schoendoerffer takes their macho values at face value and resists delving for psychological depth.
“I know men. I see what they’re like inside”, growls Claude, a boast he’ll soon come to regret. Caubère leaves a lasting impression as the truly noxious Claude, who takes a paternal attitude to his underlings and clientele, but is capable of crazed rants, pimp-slapping a friend for no good reason, and brutally screwing a young moll before casting her aside as “a heifer.” Everyone’s favourite gap-toothed, poster girl Béatrice Dalle is strong, but rather wasted as Claude’s coke-snorting, bisexual wife who, in a poorly developed subplot, struggles to bear him a son. In contrast, top-billed Benoît Magimel seems at a loss to make much of enigmatic Franck. Schoendoerffer contrasts the strong bond between the two hitmen with the dog-eat-dog duplicity of their gangster bosses, as when Franck discovers Jean-Guy’s pretty wife Laure (Anne Marivin) is sleeping with her lawyer (although he displays less moral outrage when Jean-Guy gets a blow-job at a massage parlour).
Horrific details, like kidnapped East European women sent to a training camp for whores, are wastefully thrown away alongside Larbi’s reawakened interest in Islam, the fallout from Laure’s affair, and a few scenes modelled on Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995). Franck remains a cipher right to the fadeout, which avoids the expected bang and merely fizzles out.
