Attention bandits!
1986 Crime / Drama
Credits
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Summary
Simon Verini, a once notorious crook, comes out of retirement when Mozart, the young leader
of a band of jewel thieves, puts some business his way. Whilst Verini is away
in Holland, to find a buyer for Mozart’s stolen jewels, his wife is kidnapped and held
to ransom. Although Verini hands over the jewels to the kidnapper, his wife is shot
dead before his eyes. Shortly after, he is arrested for the theft of the jewels
and sent to prison for ten years. Before his arrest, he has just enough time to
find a place for his daughter, Marie-Sophie, in an elite Swiss boarding school.
Leaving prison ten years later, Verini collects his daughter, now a grown-up young woman,
and tracks down his wife’s killer. He has no sooner taken his revenge than he is
arrested a second time. Mozart tells Marie-Sophie he will help her father to escape
from prison if she promises to marry him. Marie-Sophie agrees, although she
is already engaged to another man...
Review
By the mid-1980s, the policier was starting to go out of fashion in France, but
this did not deter director Claude Lelouch from pursuing his take on this familiar genre.
With tongue firmly in cheek, the film makes repeated references to French cinema’s affinity
for the gangster film, whilst lamenting the passing of the genre’s biggest asset, Jean
Gabin. Perhaps the post-modern wit is carried a bit too far in places – the prison
escape sequence would not be out of place in an out and out farce – but it does provide
the spectator with some unexpected fun. In fact, it is probably the film’s
comic touches which save the film; without these, it would be just another tired 1980s
crime drama.
Jean Yanne’s very creditable performance – combining the brutality of a hardened criminal with the tenderness of a loving father – is the other thing which works to the film’s advantage, compensating for the somewhat lacklustre contributions from his co-stars, Patrick Bruel and Marie-Sophie L. (the director’s wife). In spite of this, and in spite of the fact that the narrative crawls to a snail’s pace in a few places, Attention bandits is not as bad as you might expect. It is prettily filmed, far less pretentious and exploitative than Lelouch’s other 1980s offerings, and joyously funny in places. © James Travers 2004 Write a review for this film... User Comments
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