This impressively lean French thriller wastes nothing in its quest to deliver the goods.
Take the plot, for example. Lino (Alban Lenoir) has been framed for a murder he didn’t commit. The only way he can beat the charge is to find an incriminating bullet that the real culprit left embedded in the dashboard.
The director Guillaume Pierret, making a confident feature debut on Netflix, wisely doesn’t get bogged down in extraneous details. The brotherly relationship between Lino — a genius mechanic lifted from jail to turbocharge a police unit’s chase cars — and his protégé, Quentin (Rod Paradot), doesn’t eat up screen time. Neither does Lino’s barely-alluded-to romance with a cop named Julia (Stéfi Celma, of the Netflix series “Call My Agent!”).
Only at the very end do we discover that the bad guy leads a cozy domestic life with a wife and son. A lesser film might have spent several precious minutes exploring that setup to humanize him, but Pierret clearly was not interested: Who cares about some rotten dude’s inner life? Lino needs to get that red Renault to the cops, stat!
This bare-knuckle minimalism extends to the film’s style. Pierret avoids the crutches familiar to many American movies: Guns don’t figure much besides the shot that gets Lino in trouble, and there aren’t big explosions, either. Rather, the action scenes rely on legible choreography and fluid editing. Whoever directs the next Jack Reacher movie would be well advised to study the set piece in which Lino kicks and punches his way out of a police station, and the final chase is straight out of “Mad Max” in its heart-pounding simplicity.
The finale is open enough to suggest a sequel is feasible. It can’t come quickly enough.
Lost Bullet
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
