Film review: 22 Bullets

Is it time to call off the eternal rivalry between Europe and Hollywood? I watched two genre films last week, one from each side of the Atlantic, both falling loosely under the rubric of ‘action movies’; the Hollywood flick was Predators (directed by a Hungarian, but whatever), the European one was 22 Bullets. Both were quite enjoyable, but Bullets – a French crime thriller – wasn’t just better-acted and more exciting than its US counterpart, it was also slicker, flashier, arguably dumber and certainly more violent. Looks like we can beat them at their own game after all – but is that a victory for ‘us’, or merely proof that the Hollywood model now holds sway all over the world? Discuss!
Actually, the French don’t need lessons from anyone when it comes to crime thrillers. Not only do they have a long tradition of their own, but French crime movies are on a roll at the moment: A Prophet won a major prize at Cannes last year, while the two-part Mesrine made (and continues to make) quite a splash. 22 Bullets isn’t in that league, but it still exudes confidence – and boasts a major secret weapon in Jean Reno as Charley Mattei, a veteran crime boss who’s targeted by his old friend Tony (Kad Merad), left for dead with 22 bullets in his body, but somehow survives and sets out to take revenge. Reno reminds me of Laurence Fishburne, who appears in Predators (the two co-starred in Armored last year, but didn’t share many scenes together), or even Robert Mitchum – a lazy-eyed older actor, slightly gone to seed, who commands the screen with effortless charisma and deceptive Zen languor.
22 Bullets is all about Charley’s code of honour, which borders on the obsessive-compulsive (even his killing technique is strictly trademarked: a shot to the head, followed by a shot to the heart). Some people he won’t kill at all, others he’ll kill without forgiving, others he’ll forgive but kill anyway. Tony has a point when he tells him to forget about all these rules: Evil is in everyone, he says, just accept it. Charley learns that one of the thugs who shot him deliberately missed, trying not to kill him, yet he still goes after the man; when he tracks him down, however, having cornered the terrified shooter, Charley also fires to the side, deliberately missing him, then snarls “Now we’re even”. I’m sorry, that’s a bit psychotic.
His code is also what gets him shot, because Tony knows that Charley – being old-school – draws the line at selling drugs, and decides to launch a pre-emptive strike. This recalls Don Corleone in The Godfather, who was almost killed by Sollozzo for precisely the same reason – and 22 Bullets echoes The Godfather in other ways too, in dynamic cross-cutting between happy and traumatic events (e.g. a birthday party and a funeral) as well as in its emphasis on Family. We even learn that Tony – a cleanliness freak and hypochondriac – is known to his minions (behind his back, of course) as ‘The Godmother’.
22 Bullets isn’t The Godfather, of course. The plot is one-dimensional. The action scenes are good but not great, and that’s clearly a stunt double – he looks about half Reno’s size – during the motorbike chase. The violence is grisly, and a torture scene ends with an appendage getting cut off with a cleaver as a small memento. Charley himself endures much pain and suffering – he crawls through barbed wire, and gets boiling water poured on his face – but then he also talks to a cat, telling it how much he loves the sea (though he refuses the cat a shot of booze, recalling the sad fate of his dog who became an alcoholic), indulges his taste for opera and generally has fun being the coolest mec dur in the room. Sometimes – not very often for hardcore Hollywood-philes, but sometimes – you might even forget he’s speaking French.