An average movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this movie but, since I have a weak spot for Adèle Exarchopoulos, I thought I might as well check it out. I didn’t know anything about this movie before watching it and, to be honest, when I found out that it was dealing with people mutating into animals, I actually lost interest pretty much right away. Indeed, it did feel terribly gimmicky and it was not as if we didn’t already have enough real-life threats to deal with nowadays. And, yet, I have to admit that it did slowly win me over after all. Indeed, it was basically what a X-Men movie would look like if you would remove the super-powers, and I thought it was actually an intriguing idea. On top of that, for a French production like this one, the special effects were actually quite impressive. Unfortunately, it’s too bad that the damned thing turned out to be narratively so clunky. I didn’t mind that it’s started not at the very beginning of this epidemic but, in the middle of it. However, even though it seemed at first that it would be about how this family would face the mutation of this wife/mother, after she escaped, she almost completely vanished after that. Basically, after her escape, she was used only as an excuse to have François having something to do for the rest of the movie. Eventually, they shifted their focus towards the son who by the way never seemed to be really bothered by his mother’s situation. On the other hand, the poor kid had so much going on. Indeed, his mother was a mutant, because of her, he had to move to the south of France, he had to go to a new school, make some new friends, he even managed to score a girlfriend (who also had a rather odd behavior), he became besties with another mutant and, obviously, he began mutating as well. Not all of it was bad, in the contrary, but there was so much material that they could have developed a whole TV-series with that. Concerning Romain Duris, they really struggled to give his character anything really interesting to do during the whole movie and, most of the time, he was left roaming aimlessly in this forest, preferably with this cute police officer. By the way, their relationship was seriously half-baked. In fact, Adèle Exarchopoulos did end with the most bewildering character here. Eventually, she was terribly wasted as her sole function was apparently to show that not all cops are bad after all. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, I have to admit that it was still a decent watch though.