Starring: Gilles Lellouche, Roschdy Zem, Elena Anaya
Director: Fred Cavaye
Category: IIB (French)
The last time Fred Cavaye made a film, he struck Hollywood gold - his directorial debut from 2008, Anything for Her, was remade into The Next Three Days, with Paul Haggis at the helm and Russell Crowe in the leading role.
It's not difficult to see something similar happening to his second film: ticking all the boxes of a conventional thriller - the ordinary guy forced to pull off an extraordinary stunt to save his family, the awkward bond he forms with a real (but honourable) criminal, the competing teams of good and bad cops hard on his trail - Point Blank is gripping enough without having to resort to the over-stretched, logic-defying twists that undermined the high-octane adrenalin rush of his first film.
While it's a schoolteacher who did all the running, scheming and punching in Anything for Her, Point Blank has at its centre a trainee nurse, Samuel Pierret (Gilles Lellouche, above), who inadvertently saves a hospitalised felon, Hugo Sartet (Roschdy Zem), while on night duty.
That sucks Pierret into a labyrinthine conspiracy in which he's first forced to transport Santet out of the hospital at the request of someone who abducted Pierret's heavily pregnant Spanish wife, Nadia (Elena Anaya), from their home and then finds himself on the run with Sartet as he is named as a suspect in the unsolved murder of a local tycoon.
Reduced to its basics, Point Blank is, again, about a man willing to do anything for his wife (and soon-to-be-born child); perennially stubbled and somewhat too gangly for a conventional action-hero, Lellouche is effective enough in inviting sympathy for someone coerced into a scheme of things he cannot really comprehend, although a few of Pierret's daredevil deeds are unexpected from someone whose day job involves manning respirators and measuring blood pressure.