English titles: Violent City; The Family
A professional assassin is betrayed by one of his clients and by his girlfriend. He goes to prison and upon release receives an offer to join a criminal organization.
Well-filmed but poorly written crime thriller. The initial car chase is the high point of the movie. What follows seems to have been written as they went along (by a ridiculously high number of screenwriters), in such a way that sometimes we wonder whether we are watching one of those avant-garde movies where events do not follow a strictly logical order and the story repeats itself with minor variations, like in Last Year in Marienbad, or Cet obscur objet du désir, for two examples off the top of my head (but I watched those so long ago that I may be making a mistaken comparison). Also, the characters seem more like an evocation of earlier fictional avatars than any real life counterparts. As in most European genre productions, it is impossible not to sense a certain self-parodic quality. I don't understand, however, why IMDB categorizes the tarantula in the prison cell as a goof due to the fact that there are no tarantulas in Europe -- I thought he was in a prison in the Caribbean; well, maybe I was mistaken.
Rating: 38
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