Gang Story (Les Lyonnais)
In the
‘70s, Romany gypsy Edmond Vidal, aka Momon (Gérard Lanvin) was one of France’s most
notorious underworld figures.
Audacious armed robbers, he and his gang Les Lyonnais pulled off some of the country’s biggest heists,
fighting vicious gang wars and running battles with the police, before being
caught and imprisoned in 1974.
Fast-forward
to the present day and Momon is now more or less legitimate having retired from
“the business.” Unfortunately,
former best friend and major liability Serge (Tchéky Karyo), has just hit town. Owing a lot of money to a drug
syndicate he ripped off, he’s just been busted by the cops, who are pressuring
him to spill his guts and implicate, among others, Momon.
Motivated
by loyalty, honour and his own personal code while haunted by memories of his
younger self and his exploits, Momon finds himself being sucked back into the
life he’s managed to escape in a bid to help his friend that will have
devastating consequences.
Based on
the memoirs of the real-life Edmond Vidal, ex-cop turned film director Olivier
Marchal’s Gang
Story, his first
film from the other end of the cuffs, while robust, feels less sure than some
of his previous work where dodgy, renegade cops were centre-stage rather than
the crooks they’re chasing.
The police
politics and moral ambiguity of the stunning 36, MR 73 or his
flawless TV series Braquo feel real; we know this is a
world Marchal understands, has lived in. Gang
Story’s tale of
honour among thieves however, with its decades-spanning story may be slick and
ambitious, but it’s curiously uninvolving. It lacks the grit and pain of his other work, it feels flashy and
derivative, the plot predictable.
While it shares some common ground with Jean-Francois Richet’s Mesrine films, particularly in its
depiction of the links between France’s criminal class and its corrupt
political machine, it lacks the depth and weight of those films, its
protagonists lack the glamour of the real-life Mesrine while Lanvin and Karyo
lack the charisma and sheer ferocity of Vincent Cassell’s performance.
Not content
with telling one story, Marchal tells two, the film jumping around in time,
it’s present-day protagonist reminiscing about his gang’s meteoric rise and
fall; all big collars, moustaches, furious gun battles and younger actors who
look nothing like the aging Lanvin and Karyo, set to a Scorses-esque Greatest
Hits of the ‘70s soundtrack. The
heists race past in frenetic generic montage sequences of sentimental ‘70s
nostalgia, the characters feel underwritten and none of the young actors make
much of an impression with the exception of the feral Dimitri
Storoge who plays the younger Momon.
The film feels like two separate movies; a violent ‘70s-set shoot-‘em-up
and a more mournful, contemplative, character driven thriller about aging
crims. It’s unfortunate that Gang
Story doesn’t do justice to either story.
It passes
the time effectively, it’s a decent enough crime movie, but it feels rushed,
clichéd, like its trying to pack too much into it’s slender hour and three
quarters and it may have been more suited to TV where its characters may have
had room to grow and evolve. As a
Gallic wrinkle on the age-old themes of honour among thieves and bros before hos,
Gang Story is worth a watch. It’s a tough, brutal little slice of
French low-life elevated to the epic but one thing it won’t do is surprise you.
David Watson
Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Gérard Lanvin, Tchéky Karyo, Daniel Duval, Dimitri
Storoge, Patrick
Catalifo, François
Levantal, Estelle Skornik,
Language:
French
Runtime:
1 hour 42 minutes (approx.)
UK Release Date:
Friday 6th April 2012
Rating:
3/5
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