LE GUETTEUR (THE LOOKOUT)

Stars: Daniel Auteuil, Mathieu Kassovitz, Olivier Gourmet, Nicolas Briançon, Francis Renaud, Luca Argentero, Arly Jover and Violante Placido.
Writers: Denis Brusseaux and Cédric Melon.
Director: Michele Placido.

Rating: 2.5/5

The slickly commercial aesthetic that Italian director Michele Placido (The Caiman; Tulpa) applies to his French crime thriller The Lookout helps to soothe the affect of some creaky first-act clichés and rather loopy third-act developments.  

Topped and tailed by pulsating action and featuring a charismatic turn by Mathieu Kassovitz, scriptwriters Denis Brusseaux and Cédric Melon certainly can’t be accused of leaving anything on the table in their telling of a story that goes to the brink of absurdity on more than one occasion. The film generally keeps audiences on side with a flair for the grand set-piece and a narrative momentum that suggests with each increasingly nutty plot twist, just about anything might develop.

Chief Inspector Mattei (a grizzled Daniel Auteuil) has been tipped off to a major heist that is set to go down in downtown Paris. The police operation is thwarted, though, when a sniper opens fire on the gendarmes, wounding several. Mattei’s connections lead him to Kaminski (Kassovitz), that rare breed of marksmen high on Interpol’s watchlist after a post-service criminal career.

Not everything goes the robber’s way. One of their crew, Nico (Luca Argentero) is wounded and must be mended by disgraced doctor, Franck (Olivier Gourmet), who resides far from prying eyes in the French countryside, where he plies a new trade in supplying addicts with black-market morphine. At first an incidental character, Franck soon emerges as the film’s most insidious criminal, an outright psychopath whose penchant for torturing naked women spins what was a multi-handed crime melodrama, à la The Usual Suspects, into a nasty, Seven-style stomach churner (horrible violence is perpetrated against women in the film).

The convolutions of the plot are too often predicated by coincidental happenings and events that defy natural laws. Exhibit A would be in the film’s opening shootout, when Kaminski navigates several flights of stairs in the time it takes for the wounded cop he overpowered on the rooftop to cover the same distance in a lift. It lends itself to a moment of tension that brings the sniper and Mattei face-to-face, but upon reflection is preposterous. A late-stage revelation that is designed to deepen the backstory between the two key conflicted protagonists is a further step too far.

The byzantine interaction of characters provides what feels like 100 different speaking parts – the thieves (Nicolas Briançon; Francis Renaud), the cops (Jérôme Pouly), a simpering lady-lawyer (Arly Jover), Nico’s hard-bitten wife (the director’s daughter, Violante Placido) and various gypsies and petty-crim cohorts pop up then disappear with varying degrees of relevance.

Placido is a confident, competent craftsman – along with longtime collaborator, DP Arnaldo Catinari, he gives The Lookout a steely sheen that enhances the ruthless world populated by these immoral players - but not so much that a nagging sense that the whole enterprise is a little bit daft ever fully dissipates.