| |
Go Fast
|
|
| Year: |
2008
|
|
Director: |
Olivier Van Hoofstadt
|
| Stars: |
Roschdy Zem, Olivier Gourmet, Jocelyn Lagarrigue, Julie Durand, Mourade Zeguendi, David Saracino, Raphaël Marciano, Nicolas Bougourd, Marie Payen, Jil Milan, Evariste Kayembe-Beya, Samir Maagouz, Catalina Denis, Bibi Naceri, Javier Cruz, Fred Epaud
|
| Genre: |
Action, Thriller |
| Rating: |
  5 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
There's a crime going down tonight in the heart of Paris, where a gang of well-drilled jewel thieves descend on a jeweller's to steal their merchandise, not realising they are being watched by the law. This so-called anti-gang unit are if anything even more efficient that these professional thieves, and a fight breaks out with screeching tyres, shots being fired, and the bad guys rounded up. For undercover cop Marek (Roschdy Zem) this is another job and another step on the ladder to success, but he finds he cannot bask in the glory for an undercover cop he must stay...
Although a product of Luc Besson's Europa Corp, Go Fast wasn't actually produced by the French action flick expert, which was a drawback when it could have done with a dose of his personality, whether you enjoyed that or not. As it was, Go Fast was the equivalent of a nineteen-seventies police procedural, with a touch of Serpico here, a spot of The French Connection there, and a dose of all those Italian cop thrillers for flavour, though not unfortunately a huge amount. Marek was our Al Pacino stand-in for the duration, made all the more obvious by the title card which sagely informed us this was all based on true facts (as opposed to false facts?).
No sooner has he helped with the pre-credits sequence than he is off to another job, where he is pressed into service by his boss and good pal Paoli (Olivier Gourmet) to help with the drugs trade, or rather to stem the massive flow of cannabis entering Europe from Morocco. The title comes from the "Go Fast" drugs routes, where a driver for one of the gangs will speed through Spain and France on the highways at lawbreaking limits, so quickly that the police cannot catch them, which should have been the cue for a hefty amount of spectacular stunts, and to an extent it was, but for the most part the action was surprisingly uninspired for an action movie, leaving a gap where the pulse-pounding scenes should have been.
Not that this was a dead loss, but you got the impression throughout that it was about to shift into a higher gear, when actually it simply cruised along at an even pace, with the way the lead character was an undercover cop preventing us from really getting to know him, never mind the other individuals in the story. Granted he had to keep his distance from the criminals, but a nothing-y quality about your protagonist who should have been so much more interesting given his immigrant background and uncertainty about his suitability for the job by all rights could have deepened what was largely all surface, and even that surface was dutifully industrious rather than flashy.
Marek finds himself travelling through Spain to a drugs lord's mansion on the Mediterranean, where he tries to delve into the information necessary to bring the deals down and pass it on to his bosses who are tracking his every move. Is he as safe as he'd hope or is his cover about to be blown when his essential decent nature prevents him from entering into the spirit of criminality as his new "friends" do? Questions like that should be amping up the tension, but this never takes off, it coasts along making all the right movements toward the action thriller you're willing it to transform into but disappoints. That's not to complain it was badly made, it wasn't, and every so often there was a scene (such as the swapping of the dealer's car), or a character moment (Catalina Denis was enjoyable as a hard as nails gang member) which made you think, hey, finally this is getting going. But no matter its claims to be true, Go Fast looked like countless other, fictional movies of the same type. Music by Alexandre Azaria.
|
| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
|
| |
|
|
