The little hooded handkerchiefs
In To Lifeno time to fool around: five minutes into the film, the hero's apartment is stormed. The fight is decent, the villains make a fuss of it with their foreign accent, the woman who is eight and a half months pregnant single-handedly beats up half of the armed and experienced commando who came to kidnap her, in short: the spectator is preparing to have a good time fun time. Especially since, as revealed in the trailer, Guillaume Canet only has a few hours to save his darling. The countdown is set, the stakes are clear, everything seems to come together to dive headfirst into a tense thriller. And then… no.
Instead, To Life puts the handbrake on and takes us for an hour of flashback… even though the film only lasts 1h30. Instead of breaking up elements of context at a few key moments in his race against time, he prefers to expose everything in one go…even if the scenes directly linked to the main lines of the story could be condensed into around ten minutes.
Dealing with the “human under the helmet” of the GIGN is indeed part of the DNA of the project, which was also partly filmed on their premises, with real members of the elite unit as extras. The problem is that this central part (in all respects) holds more of a soft stomach than concrete abs.
Instead of the promised thriller, we end up with a sort of souvenir film of a summer camp peppered with more tragic moments, an advertising spot dedicated to virile camaraderie within the GIGN including the inevitable training montage in music.
The concern for authenticity is to be welcomed, but everything appears stretched to excess. Especially since, conversely, the discovery of the hero on which the entire plot is based is accomplished in two minutes flat. There was undoubtedly a way to create a better balance than this rudimentary construction, which seems juxtaposing two ultimately unrelated films.
Guillaume Canet in the oven and in the mill
What are Guillaume Canetis, Guillaume Canetis : the person responsible for this scenario is partly Canet himselfwho has nourished the desire to write about the GIGN since meeting a former member of the elite unit on the set of JadotvilleThibault Leveque. He shares the pen with the director Rodolphe Lauga under the supervision of David Corona, who is also a former member of the intervention group.
Two decades later Don't tell anyone who revealed it, and while his filmography is mainly filled with dramas and comedies, Canet wanted action. And if he delegates the production of one of his scenarios for the first time, the young fifty-year-old is having a blast!
More dashing than Liam Neeson, more lively than Belmondo, Canet obliged himself to four months of sustained physical preparation to take on the challenge: abseiling on the walls of the Sacré Cœurparkour on Haussmannian roofs…
-
The writing, once again, is unfortunately not up to the level of this physical commitment. His character appears to us as a sweetly stupid boy scout, with a characterization less fleshed out than an acronym. Between his Youthful romances managed with the emotional maturity of a schoolboy (with a wonderful sausage connection as a bonus) and questionable choices (his decision to stay with his partner in an apartment visited several times by his enemies…), it's difficult to get attached to him.
He also suffers from motivations as original as those of Mariobetween saving his pregnant wife and making his deceased daddy proud. Most of the narrative tracks disseminated will be abandoned upon returning to the present: his remorse after the tragedy, his relationship with the victim's son… As for the object which gives its title to the film, it is treated like a gimmick the least.
A distracting final straight line… and splitting
The advantage of saving all your cartridges for last is that the last 30 minutes ofTo Life appear rather animated. Barely out of the endless tunnel of flashbacks, it's a blast : countdown, race on the roofs, hero who must escape both the cops and the bad guys… There is something for everyone, between the motorcycle chase or the effective sequence shot in the passenger compartment of a car .
But the incident that wins our sympathy is this improbable journey from Canet on an electric paramotor in parallel with the main chase. The sequence also appears quite neat, with some pretty shots filmed in the gardens of Versailles.
The problem is rather the way in which it fits, or rather does not fit, into the rest of the action. Neither threatened nor threatening, Canet is reduced to a sort of Inspector Gadget who desperately tries to play a role but which is reduced to one photo bombing space, in the background of the scenes that really matter. As for the “fall” of the sequence, it can elicit some real bursts of laughter: for that alone, the viewing was worth it!
Ad Vitam has been available on Netflix since January 10, 2025 in France
