PARIS LOCKDOWN

(A.k.a. TRUANDS; CRIME INSIDERS)

Jean-Guy (Olivier Marchal, TELL NO ONE) poses as a taxi driver and picks up a couple from a restaurant. He pulls round a corner and his partner in crime Franck (Benoit Magimel, LA HAINE) jumps in the car. He steals money from the couple then executes them on the back seat.

In another part of the French capital, recent Muslim convert Larbi (Tomer Sisley, THE NATIVITY STORY) is released from prison and picked up in a Ferrari by his cousin, garage owner Hicham (Mehdi Nebbou, MUNICH).

We also get to meet Hicham's peroxide nephew Johnny (Ichem Saibi, OLGAS SOMMER) who is young, good-looking and in over his head playing at running his first ever nightclub.

Linking all of these dastardly characters together is Claude (Phillipe Caubere, ARAGON). Claude is a Parisian crime boss who bows to no man. He likes to kick his weight around his own clubs reminding his entourage who's boss, and sample any new women brought in to work as dancers in his bars. It matters not that he has a sexy mistress in Bea (Beatrice Dalle, INSIDE), with whom he is desperate to sire a son.

Things start to go awry for Claude when he enlists the help of Hicham and Larbi to furnish a mysterious customer known as Jacky (Nicky Marbot, 99 FRANCS) who wants to buy a whopping 150kg of cocaine.

The sale goes drastically wrong and results in a bloody daylight shootout. Which leads to the gory kneecap and eyeball torture of one of Claude's associates as he tries to ascertain who Jacky actually is.

When Jacky is finally tracked down, the job of executing him is given to Claude's old acquaintance Franck and his new pal Jean-Guy (after all, they owe Claude a favour for laundering their ill-gotten cash from the opening scene).

With one problem seemingly out of the way, Claude addresses another: Johnny is three months late paying rent to Claude. Claude issues a typically brash final reminder to Johnny by way of ramming a pole up the young lad's backside.

That's not going to sit with the struggling-to-stay-loyal Hicham, or his unruly cousin Larbi.

In fact, it would seem that Claude is out to piss just about everyone around him by being ill-tempered, obnoxious and violent to them. It's hardly surprising then when he is framed in a police raid on his home and banged up for three years.

The big questions then are: who will rule the roost in Claude's absence? With Claude out of the picture, will it become clear that he did in actual fact maintain a level of civility between various hoodlums - and is it about to degenerate into mob war now? And, as the film moves along in timely passages, what destiny lies in store for Claude upon his eventual release from the slammer?

PARIS LOCKDOWN treads little new ground in the field of gangster dramas. You've seen this done dozens of times before.

It is, however, a tremendously stylish film with some great widescreen compositions and aesthetically pleasing nourish colour schemes to boast of.

And then there's that cast. Dalle, Marchal and Magimel are instant assurances of class in my book. But it was the others that I was less familiar with who impressed me just as much, if not more. Sisley is great as the unpredictable, pissed off Larbi. While Caubere positively chews the scenery, having the time of his life as a tired and emotional gangland boss angry at everything but the one thing he despises the most: himself.

Morally, there isn't much going on here. It's the same ground that's been covered in all those Scorsese and De Palma films. You know: honour amongst thieves, family ties vs mob commitments, etc.

Speaking of De Palma, PARIS LOCKDOWN seems to have taken his SCARFACE remake as a benchmark in terms of bloody violence. The aforementioned torture scene outdoes the predecessor's infamous chainsaw set-piece easily, while the numerous bloody shootouts get wilder each time. Throw in (un)healthy doses of obscene language and full-frontal nudity too, and PARIS LOCKDOWN offers more than enough to justify it's 18 rating.

Clocking in at just under 2 hours in length, PARIS LOCKDOWN doesn't outstay it's welcome. It all ends rather predictably, but that doesn't mean the finale is without an emotional impact. At the end of the day, this is a well-made, thoroughly engaging French spin on tired Mafioso film conventions.

The UK disc offers the uncut film in a very sharp and vivid anamorphic 2.35:1 transfer, that provides great detail and good blacks.

The French audio is a problem-free affair, although it is worth noting that the English subtitles are forced.

A static scene-selection menu allows access to the main feature via 12 chapters.

The main extra is an excellent 51-minute documentary taking a look at the making of the film. Shot largely on-set or on-location in a fly-on-the-wall style, this is a revealing look into the film's shoot. It's intercut with clips from the film and is presented in French audio with forced English subtitles.

Two trailers follow: there's the 90-second English trailer which is action-packed and cleverly avoids revealing that the film's subtitled (free from dialogue, instead favouring an English narration over clips of shootouts and fighting); then there's the international trailer, which at 2 minutes in length is the better of the two. The latter is presented in French with forced English subtitles.

France has so far been one of the most interesting sources of filmmaking in this decade. PARIS LOCKDOWN continues this trend admirably.

Recommended.

Review by Stuart Willis