Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

Point Blank Blu-ray Movie Review

Dramatically blank, but it does get right to the point.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater December 6, 2011

If Jean-Luc Godard hadn’t already claimed it, Breathless would’ve been the perfect title for Point Blank, a breakneck French thriller that might very well leave you winded. It certainly gives its on-the-run characters a good workout. Chased through Paris, they jump between buildings, book it down alleyways, and even tear frantically through a crowded police station, with only rare opportunities to stop for a breather and some expository dialogue. At a brisk 84-minutes, Point Blank is the film equivalent of the 100-meter dash—as soon as the starter pistol goes off, it’s a non-stop, arm-pumping sprint to the finish.

Appropriately, then, the film starts with a literal bang—a loud one—as a wounded man bursts through a door and down a fire escape, with two assassins toting silenced pistols in fast pursuit. We have no idea who this man is—not yet, anyway—but we watch him haul-ass across a bridge and into a tunnel, where the would-be murderers finally catch up. Right when they’re about to fire off a few rounds into his chest, a speeding motorcyclist barrels around a curve and plows into the man, sending him flying through the air and across the pavement in one wince-worthy, road-rash-inducing split-second. The contract killers—their work seemingly done for them—flee the scene.

But, of course, the man—a gangster named Hugo Sartet (Roschdy Zem)—isn’t quite dead, and he’s admitted to a Paris hospital, where he’s kept sedated while various outside forces conspire to have him put more permanently to sleep. It’s here that we’re introduced to the film’s protagonist, Samuel Pierret (Gilles Lellouche), a nurse-in-training who’s interning on the floor where Hugo is being held. Samuel is your typical everyman, a loving husband who’s preoccupied with caring for his extremely pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya), but he’s about to be unwillingly mixed up in a plot that involves corrupt cops, incriminating video evidence, and a fall guy—Hugo—who never took the fall. Working the graveyard shift, Samuel saves Hugo after another botched attempt on the criminal’s life, but he has little time to feel like a hero. The next morning, he’s clobbered over the head and knocked unconscious while his wife is kidnapped. When he wakes up, he gets the ultimatum—if he doesn’t sneak Hugo out of the hospital and bring him to a cold storage facility on the outskirts of town, Nadia will be summarily shot. Now, if that’s not enough to motivate a man, I don’t know what is.

Samuel goes through with it—he has to—but after the hospital escape the situation gets increasingly more complicated in ways I’d rather not explicitly spoil. Suffice it to say that the instant Samuel incapacitates a cop with a pair of high-voltage resuscitation paddles, he’s no longer on good terms with the French police. But the cops aren’t exactly all good either. Sure, there are a few with integrity, like Fabre (Mireille Perrier)—a tough female detective who gives Samuel the benefit of the doubt—but there’s a whole squadron of crooked men in blue led by the wolfish Commander Werner (Gérard Lanvin), a scheming hardass who conspicuously wants to take over the Hugo case.

The plot unspools like a thread tied to Samuel’s leg as he hot-foots it around town, avoiding police detection and anxiously trying to figure out how to get his wife back. And hot-foot it he does, leaping and scrambling and generally looking like an in-shape but inexperienced average Joe forced to do parkour at gunpoint. You can mark time in the film by the growing sweat stain on the front of his shirt, and his panting might as well be the movie’s out-of-control metronome. In one memorable scene, Samuel stops for a brief second in an alley to puke, and then he’s off again. This is a film with almost zero downtime.

Considering the premise—a male nurse and a hardened criminal go into unintentional cahoots—it’s easy to imagine Point Blank devolving into some kind of half-baked buddy comedy. Thankfully, that’s not the case. Director Fred Cavaye—a fashion photographer-turned-filmmaker best known for Anything for Her, remade stateside as The Next Three Days—keeps the tone lean and mean, with frequent moments of jarringly unexpected violence. And although Samuel and Hugo never become wisecracking, one-liner-delivering besties, they do develop a mutual respect and reliance that plays out satisfyingly on screen. Gilles Lellouche and Roschdy Zem are perfect fits for their roles, but it's the veteran, César Award-winning actor Gérard Lanvin who steals the film, gritting his teeth and narrowing his eyes into an almost Clint Eastwood-ish squint.

As a thriller, Point Blank is a tightly wound coil that explodes with long-burning kinetic energy, but it ultimately can’t outrun its lack of real substance. When you think of the French gangster films of yore—by Melville and Bresson and Truffaut—you think not only of how impossibly cool they are, stylistically, but also of how they usually came pre-loaded with all kinds of ethical or philosophical or artistic subtexts. In comparison, Point Blank is all empty action. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—sometimes you just want a movie that will blow you away without ever engaging your brain—but a more measured pace and more fully developed characters would, in turn, make Point Blank much more memorable. As it stands—or runs, rather—it’s genuinely gripping for all of its 80-some minutes, but once it ends it doesn’t leave much of an impression beyond muscle memory. So, enjoy it while it lasts and let the film amp you up, but try to refrain from doing any insane free-running stunts afterward.

Point Blank Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Magnolia Home Entertainment has given Point Blank a strong Blu-ray treatment, with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer—framed in the film's intended 2.35:1 aspect ratio—placed on a roomy dual-layer disc. Shot on 35mm, the movie retains all of its filmic texture—no DNR or edge enhancement abuses here—and the overall look is intentionally gritty, with a fairly chunky grain pattern, even in bright daylight scenes. You will notice a handful of shots that look quite soft, but I'd chalk this up to imprecise focusing rather than a transfer or grain issue. Most of the film, however, exhibits a strong degree of clarity, with fine detail apparant in the actors' creased faces, the details of the costumes, and—especially—the individually visible salt-and- pepper whiskers that make Gérard Lanvin so wolf-like. The film's color palette is purposely muted—the desaturated color grading emphasizes the movie's stark intensity—but the tones are dense and consistent. Black levels, on the other hand, are somewhat variable; they're usually deep, but there are a few scenes where the blacks are raised to a milky gray. You'll also spot a few brief instances of moiré—on the fire escape in the first scene—and a slight increase in noise during darker sequences. No big deal, though. Point Blank is definitely a visually satisfying experience in high definition.

Point Blank Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As usual for their import titles, Magnolia has given U.S. audiences a choice between two audio options, the film's original French mix and an English dub, both presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. The dub isn't the worst I've ever heard, but unless you've got a severe allergic reaction to subtitles, the French track is most definitely the way to go. The multi-channel mix has no trouble keeping up with the film's non-stop action, outputting a dynamic and constantly engaging soundscape. The streets of Paris are filled with ambience, subway sounds clamor, the police station is aurally hectic, and when the film gets more aggressive—shootouts, namely—the surround speakers are put to great use. All of this is supported by grounded bass and clean highs. The score is pretty typical for this kind of pulse-pounding action movie, but the music has all the depth and presence it needs. Most importantly, dialogue is always clear and easy to understand, even when the film is at its most frantic. The disc includes optional English, English SDH, and Spanish subtitles, along with the choice of English subs on titles and text only.

Point Blank Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes Documentary (1080p, 50:00): There's only one real bonus feature on the disc, but it's a doozy, a fifty-minute making-of documentary that opens with a spoiler warning—don't watch this before the film proper—and includes lots of interviews and behind-the- scenes footage.
• Point Blank Trailer (1080p, 2:04)
• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment (1080p, 9:04)

Point Blank Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Point Blank—which, I should clarify, has nothing to do with the 1968 film of the same name—is an unrelentingly fast-paced crime thriller that delivers some chest-pounding on-foot chase sequences and several moments of WTF-inducing violence. It might be dramatically lacking—the film doesn't slow down enough to develop its characters—but as a pure action movie it's aces. Magnolia's Blu-ray release is top-notch too. Check it out if you're looking for a crime thriller outside the Hollywood norm. Recommended.