Charly Mattei has turned a new leaf on his past as an outlaw. For the past three years he's been living a comfortable life and devoting himself to his wife and two kids. However, one winter morning, he's left for dead in the underground parking garage of Marseille's Old Port with 22 bullets in his body. Against all odds, he will not die. A retired mobster goes on a revenge spree after being left for dead with 22 bullets in his body by his former childhood friend. I can't believe that in all of France there isn't one person who can do a decent translation of French into English subtitles. Considering that Reno is a major star, you'd think they would provide those of us viewers who "je ne parle pas" with less embarrassing captions. I mean c'mon folks, it's really annoying to have to translate the translation. This was on par with the worst of Russian and Asian subtitle efforts – only not nearly as funny.<br/><br/>Notwithstanding the lousy captions, as far as I could tell Jean Reno plays retired French mobster Charlie Mattei who is assassinated and shot 22 times. He survives, miraculously, and vows to find out who ordered the hit. Very soon the line between friends and foes starts to blur as he gets closer to the truth and the core of Marseille's underbelly.<br/><br/>22 Bullets - originally titled "L'immortel" - is a vengeance movie as much as it is a mafia flick, so I am not surprised that the angle shifts from who-dunnit to "how's he gonna kill 'em all?" Still, L'immortel is trying to sell itself to us as serious crime drama, showing some historic snippets of Reno becoming the kingpin and so forth. But L'immortel never really is more than skin deep when it comes to the characters' backgrounds, careers or lifestyles, therefore their actions, thoughts and motivations stay in the dark.<br/><br/>L'immortel has a few highlights, but complexity, character development and consistency are not its strong suit. Most importantly however it lacks the street cred and its authenticity of e.g. GOMORRAH. L'immortel may not be a terrible movie, but it's not much more than overcooked stew made of the genre's most frequently used ingredients. It is against my method of reviewing to compare one movie to another and I won't do so here either, but I want to mention that Jean Reno played a great role in the movie Leon as an social inept assassin who gets saddled with a teen girl. There is however nothing remarkable about 22 Bullets or The immortal(L'Immortal) as it is called in France. <br/><br/>Reno plays Mattei a retired gangster who gets gunned down in an underground garage by an unknown group of men for unknown reasons. Instead of dying he survives the 22 bullets that hit him and it is obvious that he is going for some payback time. The hit men send one of their own to the hospital to finish the work they started, but he kills the wrong person. <br/><br/>The next one and half hour we follow Mattei down a beaten path figuring out who the hit men are, why they tried to kill him and killing them one after the other. This trail of dead bodies would have given setups for some special deaths, like having the guy with the dogs killed by his dogs, or killed with an overdoses of cocaine, for Mattei catches him in a drugs lab, but nothing of the kind is ever used. It is pretty boring run-of-the-mill what you get to see.<br/><br/>The movie keeps forgetting important stuff. For instance Mattei is numb in his right hand but yet he can steer a motorcycle several times in the movie during chases. How the heck is Mattei going to control the throttle with his numb right hand?<br/><br/>At yet another time we witness how the female cop is being spied upon in her car so the hit men can find out where Mattei's family is, but a few scenes later we see Mattei planning with the same cop in the same car and apparently the hit men are now not listening in. <br/><br/>All kinds of silliness abounds. At one moment Mattei has to liberate his young son from the bad guys. So he jumps on the windscreen of the car, then proceeds to pound the guy against the car slamming him repeatedly, while he knows his son is locked up in the boot and must have been terrified to death. At another moment Mattei is fighting with someone in a kitchen. He gets overpowered, and just right at that time the cops bust in to save him.<br/><br/>The police is, of course, hugely inept so Mattei can get away with killing his enemies unopposed. At one moment the police botches a tailing job when they try to find out where he goes by chasing him around town with cars. With such an inept law enforcement agency Mattei can even get away with gunning people down in broad daylight in the streets. <br/><br/>One watches this movie, is baffled by the silliness and looks for any redeeming qualities. Well, some attempts a depth are made, but really there isn't much here that warrants any further attention. A b-movie at best.
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345 weeks ago