7.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Franck Adrien is serving a prison sentence for robbery. When he learns that his wife is in financial difficulty he confides in his cellmate, Jean-Louis Maurel, the location of the booty of his last heist. Maurel is due to be released soon and Franck is certain that he can trust him to come to his wife’s rescue...
Starring: Albert Dupontel, Alice Taglioni, Stéphane Debac, Sergi López, Natacha RegnierForeign | 100% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Crime | Insignificant |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.34:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
French: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Note: One major plot point is (unavoidably) revealed in the plot summary below. Those who don’t want to read
any ostensible spoilers should skip to the technical aspects of the review.
Take a dash of Taken, mix in a sprinkling
of The Next Three Days,
and finally top things off with a soupçon of Gallic crime film sensibility a la Mesrine: Killer Instinct, and you’ll have a pretty good
idea of the occasionally filling casserole that awaits in the 2011 French film The Prey. This is a movie that offers a
glut of previously seen tropes—a prison breakout, a kidnapped child, a well meaning but initially misdirected (female) cop
—and blends them together in equally preordained ways, but which manages to deliver several viscerally exciting set
pieces nonetheless. Largely predictable and even mechanical at times, The Prey still manages to keep its
cinematic head above water for most of its running time due to a quintet of extremely memorable performances. Albert
Dupontel portrays hardscrabble thief Franck Adrien, who’s in stir for a massive heist whose proceeds only he knows the
location of. He’s allowed conjugal visits with his beautiful wife (Caterina Murino), but is basically just biding time until his
sentence is up in only about eight months. He keeps his distance from just about everybody else in the prison, including
his former partner (Olivier Schneider), who is of course rather eager to find out where the loot is stashed, but most
especially from his mild mannered cellmate Jean-Louis Maurel (Stéphane Debac), a milquetoast who’s been accused of
child molestation and is so fearful of the general prison population that he refuses to even venture outside for the
prisoners’ recreational time. In one of the film’s few unexpected developments, it turns out that Franck has less to fear
from Novick (despite the collaborator putting an icepick halfway up Franck’s ear at one point) than from Maurel, who it
initially appears was telling the truth when he insisted he was innocent of the pedophilia charges and is released after
his supposed victim recants her story. A visit to Franck from a badly scarred former policeman named Manuel Correga
(Sergi Lopez) lets Franck in on the fact that Maurel is a lot more devious than he seems, and Franck, who had
confided in Maurel after the icepick attack, now realizes his wife and young daughter Amélie (the adorable Jaia
Caltagirone) are in imminent danger.
The Prey is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Media Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.34:1. This high definition transfer boasts excellent detail and admirably saturated and accurate looking color. In fact, for a chase thriller like this one, the film in unusually scenic as director Eric Valette and cinematographer Vincent Mathias make great use of some stunning locations (most but not all in France, as discussed in the director interview included on the Blu-ray as a supplement). Though technical data on the film is hard to come by, it appears this was digitally shot, with the typical extremely sleek and crisp appearance of this format. The film hasn't been aggressively color graded (aside from a couple of minor adjustments like a digital day for night scene where Franck breaks into an apartment house), and that helps boost fine detail. The bulk of the film takes place out of doors, and the bright, sun dappled environments have beautiful striations of light and some impressive depth of field in wide shots. There are a couple of transitory banding artifacts, but otherwise this is a great looking release.
The Prey features lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mixes in both the original French and an English dub. (This is one of a recent spate of releases that offers an initial menu asking the viewer to choose which language they want, but even after the choice is made, audio options on the remote allow changes to be made.) The film has a number of great immersive moments, from the cavernous echoes inside the jail to the blast of wind virtually blowing Franck off the top of the train to Franck and a cop blasting through a second story window and falling in a thundering heap on a police van. The low end here is quite impressive, amped up considerably by Noko's enjoyable score. Dialogue is very cleanly presented and (surprise of surprises) the English dub is actually tolerable, though I would still recommend sticking with the original language option.
Don't come to The Prey expecting any radical reworking of time honored chase films tropes. But do expect The Prey to deliver a rather unexpected amount of thrills and excitement. The four main performances are aces, and Valette stages things effectively from the first moment of the film. Recommended.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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