A good movie

What the hell happened to Mathieu Kassovitz's directing career? After the massive critical success of 'La haine', he became overnight the most promising French director at the time. Unfortunately, after the huge failure of 'Babylon A.D.', he decided to finish this pet project on which he spent maybe 10 years but it was again another misfire which was barely seen and rather poorly received and he hasn't made another movie since then. Well, I was still eager to watch the damned thing and I thought it was actually not bad at all. Indeed, it even reminded me of 'Paths of Glory', one of my favorite movies directed by Stanley Kubrick. However, a big difference between these movies was while Kubrick's classic was about WWI, this movie was about a rather obscure conflict which lasted only a week in New Caledonia with maybe 40 casualties. So, even though Kassovitz obviously thought that there was a major story to be told here, he was probably the only one, I’m afraid. Another mistake was to cast himself as the lead. I mean, he wasn’t really bad but it would have worked better with an older actor and, above all, his casting reinforced the whole egotrip feeling of this project. Finally, the other problem with this movie was that, even though it was dealing with a Kanak rebellion, the Kanaks didn’t have much to do as they passively waited on the sideline that the French characters would influence positively or negatively the outcome of this rebellion. And, of course, the ending which you could be translated like ‘If truth hurts, lies kill’ was just so prententious. Still, in spite of its flaws, even though the whole thing was eventually a rather misguided project, I thought it was a well made historical thriller and it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Mathieu Kassovitz's work. 


7/10