Film review: Point Blank

A breakneck pace conceals a really muddled plot in this French thriller, but it's all done with such verve that it's forgivable – unlike the clichéd pregnant woman in peril

• Gilles Lelouche is Samuel Pierret, a nurse who quickly becomes an action hero in Point Blank

Point Blank (15) ***

Directed by: Fred Cavay

Starring: Gilles Lellouche, RoschDy Zem, Elena Anaya

DESPITE the fact that this French thriller rather brashly borrows its title from John Boorman's 1967 revenge classic of the same name, Point Blank is not a remake – at least not of that film. That it feels like a remake of plenty of others is down to its status as straight-up suspense thriller. That's not necessarily a bad thing. In the world of genre film-making, there's something comforting about being confronted with familiar plot beats; the trick is to make sure these plot beats don't feel overly familiar to the point where the film becomes boringly predictable.

Mercifully, that doesn't happen too often in Point Blank. Part Hitchcockian wrong-man thriller, part corrupt cop drama and part audacious heist movie, it's the latest from Fred Cavay, the up-and-coming French writer/director who made the preposterous (and not in a good way) thriller Anything for Her. That film was remade recently as the knuckle-gnawingly awful Paul Haggis/Russell Crowe film The Next Three Days, and if you've seen either version (the remake sticks fairly closely to the original) you'll be familiar with the way Cavay doesn't necessarily let things like plausibility or narrative coherence get in the way of the story he's intent on telling. The good news about Point Blank is that while the film's premise is no less outrageous or preposterous than his debut, it's outrageous and preposterous in a much more stripped down, tightly wound kind of way, delivering its thrills efficiently rather than pretentiously skirting round them.

Things get rolling almost immediately with an explosive opening that results in the film's crooked antagonist, Hugo (Roschdy Zem), ending up under police guard in a hospital. There he's treated by wrong time/wrong place male nurse Sam (Gilles Lellouche), who helps save his life and promptly discovers no good deed goes unpunished when he returns home to his pregnant wife, Nadia (Elena Anaya), only to have his domestic bliss shattered by masked gunmen bursting in and kidnapping his about-to-pop missus. Knocked unconscious in the ensuing struggle, he wakes up in his apartment to the sound of a ringing mobile, the voice on the other end of which duly informs him he but a few hours to break Hugo out of the hospital or he'll never see his wife again.

Of course, if you're even faintly familiar with this kind of film, you'll know the drill by now as this sensitive Everyman – a male nurse, no less – is forced to dig deep and find a steely resolve that will allow him to do things he would never do in a million years were his wife's life not hanging in the balance (quite literally, at times). And sure enough, with the clock ticking down, cops are knocked out, bosses are defied, criminals are aided and Sam finds himself transformed from sappy zero to stressed-out hero in record time.

What kicks the film up a gear is the way Cavay uses the relentless pace he deploys to sneak in the kind of mind-boggling plot turns that could easily have thrown the film off course were we given enough time chew them over properly. Indeed, that he manages to include subplots involving corrupt cops, a daring assault on a high-security police station and grudgingly formed bond between Sam and Hugo, whom Sam is aiding and abetting for reasons that aren't exactly clear to him (well, beyond the fact that someone has his wife), shows that Cavay is really coming into his own as a film-maker who can make commercial films that are disposable, but -- on this evidence at least – aren't insultingly dumb in terms of their execution.

Having said that, points off for making Sam's wife pregnant. An increasingly common and specious plot development in movies (see also this week's Mother's Day), its presence here merely compounds one dated misogynistic movie concept – the helpless woman – another, more troubling one that suggests that in movies, a woman's life is no longer worth anything unless she's with child. That this also makes the outcome a little more predictable than it would otherwise have been is a further reason why Cavay – and indeed all directors – should strive to come up with something a little less clichd.

That annoying misstep aside, there's still plenty to enjoy here and French cinema does seem particularly well placed for making these kinds of films at the moment. Perhaps it's because French directors aren't beholden to the star system in the way that Hollywood film-makers are. Lellouche and Zem, while actors of some note in France, don't come with the kind of movie star baggage that frequently sabotages blockbusters. Instead they ground Point Blank and make it easier to buy into the ridiculous plot, which in this kind of film is essential.