Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

The Prey Blu-ray Movie Review

Prison or on pris.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 22, 2014

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.

One of the things The Prey does virtually from its first frame is establish what a brutal place the prison Franck is being held in is. After his conjugal visit ends, two guards enter the room Franck is in with his wife and engage is some patently provocative banter. One of the guards, a gum chewing goon, seems especially hard hearted. This particular guard will play an important part in the opening third or so of the film, turning out to be a conspirator of sorts with various real goons who are imprisoned at the facility. It’s obvious however that Franck can take care of himself and is simply going to ignore the guards’ taunts as much as possible.

Things take a desperate turn when the main troublesome guard arranges for a trio of really dangerous inmates to be set free one night to exact a little justice on Maurel, who as mentioned above is too afraid of the general prison population to ever set foot outside of his cell. The three give Franck the chance to wait out in the hallway while they do their dirty work, which he initially decides is the best course. But after listening to Maurel’s screams of pain and terror, not to mention the extreme pummeling sounds emanating from his cell, he gets involved, quickly dispatching the three bad guys until the guards, waking up to the fact that their dastardly plan hasn’t worked, decide to finally come down and break things up.

Maurel seems genuinely grateful that Franck has saved his life, and Franck finally lets his guard down a little bit after he’s attacked by his former partner (with that aforementioned icepick), waking up in the infirmary with Maurel standing protectively over him. Maurel divulges that he’s about to be set free and wants to help Franck in any way he can. Because Franck fears his former partner is going to try to get to his wife and little girl, he asks Maurel to warn them and gives him a clue as to where the loot is stashed. At this point the film, takes its interesting left turn. A well done montage cut into a scene where an ex-cop visits Franck in prison reveals that it’s Maurel who is actually the menace that Franck should have been concerned about. The plot with the bad seed guard and the three inmates rears its ugly head one last time, but also provides Franck a way to bust out of the joint and try to save his family.

Meanwhile, we’ve also been introduced to beautiful female detective Claire Linné (Alice Taglione), who has been going after some pretty big fish in France’s crime scene. However, once Franck engineers his jailbreak, her superiors ask her to track him down, something that she’s initially none too keen to do. Franck comes to a horrifying discovery about his wife and little girl, and the chase is on. Franck is after Maurel and Claire is after Franck. Maurel shows that he’s not just any petty pedophile, for he’s stolen some hair off of Franck’s brush and is busy planting DNA evidence on a bunch of Maurel’s crime scenes.

Much of the foregoing isn’t especially innovative, but director Eric Vallette has a great sense of pace and stages some fantastically effective set pieces (in the accompanying featurette Vallette indicates he specifically asked for a big action scene every 20 minutes in the screenplay). Some of these are also “been there, seen that” in a way, including an adrenaline pumping scene that finds Franck atop a high speed train kind of like Hugh Jackman in The Wolverine 3D. But even here The Prey doesn’t overplay its hand and actually delivers a rather sly sense of humor (initially passengers in the train are too attached to their handheld devices to even see Franck hanging over a window, but they are then a bit shocked when he manages to get a window open and pulls the emergency brake—from the outside).

As mentioned above, it’s the bristling performances that really help to elevate The Prey above its kind of standard fare offering. Dupontel is tough as nails for most of the film, but then reveals an almost shocking tenderness when his young daughter reenters the fray. Taglione doesn’t have a lot of outright emoting to do here, but she’s physically quite impressive, handling her action scenes brilliantly. The film really belongs to the very creepy turns by Stéphane Debac and Maurel and Natacha Régnier as his equally spooky wife. Debac is especially impressive in how he suddenly morphs from an innocent seeming sissy into a really disturbing predator. Régnier is similarly unforgettable as a woman who loves her husband for the special “gifts” he brings her. The Prey may in fact not offer much that’s new under the sun, but at least in this case the sun is shining on some beautiful European locations and the cast is definitely up for the journey.

The Prey Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

The Prey Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes Featurette (480i; 38:09) is pretty standard fare (as evidenced by its generic title), but has some interesting footage of things like fight choreography being worked out.


• Interview with the Director Eric Vallette (1080p; 13:29). Vallette discusses helping to formulate the project and also gets into some of the nuts and bolts of the casting process and the shoot.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:11)

The Prey Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.