“Ad Vitam” on Netflix: a quietly handsome and naughty thriller with Guillaume Canet

Under the Seine, The Wages of Fear, GTmax… Netflix continues to roll out its parade of French-style action films, to the point of establishing itself as a sort of new stable of false encores – a factory for crude, well-produced and quietly cheesy thrillers and fantasy films, which would not have neither obviously the charm of craftsmanship, nor for all that the nobility of high-end. But with obviously good enough financial arguments to attract the biggest names in French stardom, such as Guillaume Canet, who here finds the muscular thriller almost twenty years after his small sparks in the genre (Don’t tell anyone)…

Also co-author of the screenplay, Canet invested a lot in this film which imagines him as a GIGN officer entangled in a dark affair having already cost him a colleague, and perhaps soon his pregnant wife: a strange intervention went wrong, and nebulous officials, scattered throughout the secret services, begin to threaten our hero, who decides to find them at his own risk in order to avenge his friend.

Between Bourne, Hunt and Bébel

The actor thus lands somewhere between Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt and Bébel. In the first, he takes the advantageous role of the tormented and unstoppable hyper-agent, determined to go up his entire hierarchy to drop beautiful laundry. From the second, we find the taste for improvisation, running and eccentric requisitions of vehicles, bordering on the gag in a last act which swings between SUV, motocross and ULM (yes) in the middle of the alleys of the castle of Versailles.

As for the third, it of course sits in a hexagonal model for this adventure film apparently without stuntmen, but with lots of roofs, balconies and gutters, as in The Man from Rio. The problem is that there is no humor here – or worse, there is often some involuntarily, as in this whole ultralight chase, irresistibly funny, absurd like a car chase. Fantomas.

To Lifea torrent of television déjà vu

Apart from these parentheses, contemplating the actor’s honorable parkour accomplishments on the roofs of Paris is a cruel experience of loss of rhythm, where one feels a bit like a parent forced to indulgence in the face of the yamakasi show organized by his child on the terrace.

The rest is just a torrent of television déjà vu, in a register of gently mascu beaufism (the camaraderie of the barracks, ritualized from start to finish, where everyone, and especially each, knows their place) and sloppy barbouzerie (these Z-series villains have ridiculously absurd plans: unleash national carnage to bury the evidence of a skirmish of a hundred times less seriousness).

There is perhaps only proof of the martingale that certain platforms have achieved: bringing together the stars of the big screen in the telefilm system, by establishing themselves as the keystone of the production landscape, while imperceptibly bringing its range policy back to the level of this one – a bit as if, in the early 2000s, Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris played in TF1 Sunday evening productions.

To Lifeby Rodolphe Lauga, with Guillaume Canet, Stéphane Caillard, Nassim Lyes. Available on Netflix.