Ultimate Heist Reviews

When a film has as many alternate titles as Le Premier Cercle - aka Ultimate Heist, Inside Ring and The Dead List - it's never a good sign, and while it's not an outright turkey it's certainly a plodding and clichéd by the numbers crime flick that never catches fire. Jean Reno almost sleepwalks through his role as the head of a clan of immigrant Armenian armed robbers in the kind of professional but uninspired performance you get from someone who has done this sort of thing too many times before to get excited by it. Like Jean Gabin in his later years, he seems to be lending his presence without putting himself out too much, which is understandable with such a workmanlike script. The film's main focus is on his son Gaspard Ulliel, who wants to go legit and open a hotel in the Carmague with beautiful physiotherapist Vahina Giocante only for the family business and Sami Bouajila's smouldering cop to get in the way. Will Ulliel join his father for one last big heist? Will Reno kill the boy's pregnant girlfriend to bring him back in the fold? Will the audience be able to stay awake? Bouajila's the only one who seems to invest much presence in the film, but he's underused in a stock role while, despite making a minor impression with interesting French ghost story Children's Play ( Un jeu d'enfants ) ( A Children's Game ) [ English subtitles ] [DVD] eight years earlier, Laurent Tuel's direction is low key to the point of inertia at times and is given no help by Alain Kremski's dreary minimalist piano score which sounds like the kind of thing you hear on a public domain copy of a silent movie, and not in a good way. Move on, nothing to see here...

The NTSC DVD has an acceptable subtitled widescreen transfer with no extras apart from a few unrelated trailers.