Inconsistent

Rating: 6/10 (7 May 2018)

Ofcourse the entire premise of The Intouchables is a bit of a cliché these days with the strong black man helping the weak white man, yet it is not a film of irrelevant political propaganda and steers clears of this subject quite well.
The better parts of the film is primarily that it has some great shots, an incredible piece of piano notes music by Ludovico Einaudi & some great acting by especially Francois Cluzet ( Phillipe ) as the invalid aristocrat. Unfortunately however, the bonding of the two cultures of the main characters make little sense. Driss ( Omar Sy ) does not seem like a particularly nice guy and even his family isn't all too keen on him for reasons that he has caused on his own. Somehow for reasons unknown this eventually changes causing Driss to seemingly even care and freak out about things in Philippe's life that seem to be a bit out of character for him. Yet even though their relationship seems far fetched, it does still have a certain charm to it which makes it convincing enough as a piece of entertainment.
The acting is mostly good, especially by Francois as stated before, who does a great job of facial acting too. Omar Sy is a bit inconsistent as Driss due to some weird outbursts & a couple of cringy scenes ( the dancing or the consistent flirting with the secretary becomes quite a cringe to watch ) featuring him which kind of makes me think he is the French Chris Tucker. The film isn't as emotionally powerful as it would like to be. The music by Ludovico Einaudi is a splendid emotional piece, so that is not the problem. The problem seems the movie feels a bit too much like a 'feelgood' movie due to the buddy relationship that the mixes between emotion and light hearted feelgood scenes are hard to make. However, a couple of scenes especially near the end do manage to succeed in this aspect, helped by Einaudi's score and some excellent facial acting by Francois Cluzet.
The movie is mostly quite grey and not very pretty, and a lot of shots follow Driss closely from over the shoulder resulting in quite an ugly bouncing camera kind of shots. However, there are a couple of shots where the cinematography really shines. Most of these shots come from the position of the camera behind the two men, with Driss left and Phillipe right, which is a pose used many times during the film. Especially the one right before the parachuting scene is a beautiful one, yet this is followed with quite a weird shot in the parachuting scene itself from some kind of onboard camera like it is a documentary, which is unfortunate since there truly are many great shots in the film, but also a lot of uglier ones.
It is a film with some great acting and some lesser acting, some great emotional scenes and some cringy scenes, and some beautiful shots and some ugly ones. While overcoming its cliché concept of a story on a splendid manner, it is not quite as great as it wanted to be.