Oh Yes this is Europe!

Rating: 9/10 (15 October 2012)

This film is done for the European public first of all but it should work in the USA with the nostalgia of so many action films and of course Midnight Express. But the main difference with this film is that here we do not know why the Albanians and this American security agent are fighting. Albania was on the border of the war in Kosovo. So we know there is a political problem and stake. Albania was the communist country that had absolutely banned all religious activities and all religious expression. So, what's left to keep the Albanians away from kidnapping young girls and women to feed them in their lucrative prostitution network? Nothing, not even religious beliefs to try to repent, at least five minutes a day. And we just learned Albania is getting ready to join the European Community. Really? Yes, so they say in the media.
Even more surprising is the fact that the action mainly takes place in Turkey, in Istanbul. Turkey wants to join the European Community and the Euro Zone and that's tricky to provide the European public with that totally violent, terroristic and immoral image of Istanbul. Is it trying to ask this question from all Europeans: Are you going to let that country enter the European Community as if they were peaceful and law-abiding? Or is it asking that other question from the Turks: How can you dare to want to enter the European Community when you are not even able to prevent your territory from being used like that by terrorists without any other motivation than their personal vengeance? The film is ambiguous and very obscure as for its political and ideological motivations. It cannot move the Americans who know nothing about these political questions, but it may frankly be disturbing to the European or Turkish public.
But it is a film by Luc Besson. So there are other elements than just this unclear ideological context.
First it is an action film and Luc Besson here uses an extremely rapid tempo with no slowing down except to increase the suspense and to make us fear the worst. The action is also extremely simple in the means it uses. No super technology. The good old simple cars and car chases, then a simple pager, then some simple guns: grenades, hand guns and some assault automatic guns. That's all. All the rest is simple running and tricky inventiveness. Of course the escape through the window and along a narrow cornice on the façade of a hotel has already been used but its simplicity works perfectly well.
Second Luc Besson has to add a child, here a teenage daughter that should be just over sixteen, since she is trying to get her driver's license and she has already failed twice. Her being in any kind of danger is poignant of course, and her mother being captured and used as bait is just as bad. And Luc Besson cannot evade the cliché, but so well done and used, of the father fixation and of that father who saves his daughter first and his wife, at least twice. We remember Léon of course and the little girl he decides to help in her necessary vengeance since all her family has just been executed by some dumb terrorists. That's a syndrome if not a tic or even an idiosyncrasy of Luc Besson's: the father figure that saves the day of a daughter, a mother, a family, a victim of some terroristic gang violence. That gives a touch of empathy.
The end then would not surprise at all and is so typical of Besson again. The daughter is over sixteen and so she is of age. So she has a boyfriend and the father is kind of jealous somewhere, but Besson must be aging since he is able to make the father step back from his protective jealousy concerning his daughter. Charming.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU