Les Brigades du Tigre (2006)
Directed by Jérôme Cornuau

Film Review

Les Brigades du Tigre is the latest in a number of big budget films to have been made in France recently which are re-makes of classic French television series.  After Belphégor (2001), Vidocq (2001) and Arsène Lupin (2004), it is now the turn of the hit crime series Les Brigades du Tigre, broadcast between 1974 and 1983, to get the glitzy millennium makeover treatment.  The recipe is simple and requires next to no talent or imagination.  Hire the biggest name actors you can afford.  Spend the equivalent of the Gross Domestic Product of Luxembourg on sets, costumes and special effects.  Crowbar in as many action sequences as possible, using as much theatrical blood as you can, whether the plot requires it or not.  Of course, the film (if one can call it that) will be totally lacking in dramatic coherence and will have as much artistic merit as a bowl of cornflakes, but if you put enough effort into marketing, you should recoup the production cost and make enough of a profit to finance the next riotous expedition into mediocrity.  As they say in France: Les doigts dans le nez.

Unlike most of its predecessors, this particular revamp does have something going for it.  As a pacy adventure thriller it just about delivers the goods (even if this is somewhat undermined by the unjustifiably long runtime).  The action scenes are well choreographed, well shot and edited with some degree of flair.  To its credit, the film also has something resembling a plot.  Admittedly, it is a plot whose synopsis you would be hard pressed to get onto five pages of foolscap and is as labyrinthine and murky as the London sewage system, something that would challenge the powers of concentration of a mathematical genius with the cerebral wherewithal of Stephen Hawking.

The film also has an attractive cast, although it's a shame that not one of the big name actors who were roped into this production with a bank account busting fee felt obliged to give even a half-decent performance.  Maybe they, like the audience, were so bewildered by the script that they hadn't the faintest idea what they were doing.  Olivier Gourmet, in particular, looks completely lost, as though he wandered onto the wrong set one day and no one bothered to tell him.  Crass comic book dialogue such as "You won't stop history", "I will stop yours" doesn't exactly inspire histrionic excellence, but that hardly excuses the completely characterless performances from the likes of Clovis Cornillac and Edouard Baer...

Film Synopsis

In 1907, to counter the rising tide of violent crime in France, a special police unit known as the Mobile Brigade is set up by the Home Office minister Georges Clemenceau (a.k.a. The Tiger).  In 1912, the unit is assigned to investigate a street hold-up in which the only thing stolen is a seemingly innocuous account book belonging to Cagne, a man tasked with managing state loans to Russia.  Led by Commissaire Valentin, the officers of the Tiger Brigade succeed in tracking down and killing the men involved in the robbery, including their leader, Bonnot.  The latter was both lover and fellow conspirator of Constance, the wife of the Russian Prince Radetsky.  She is implicated in an anarchist plot to effect social great social and political change in Russia by weakening the country's relationship with France.   Concerned that the activities of the Tiger Brigade may harm the Triple Entente which is due to be signed between Russia, France and Great Britain, the conventional French police, acting for the government, intervenes to halt the investigation. Unfortunately, this leaves the anarchists free to achieve their aims, beginning with the assassination of Prince Radetsky...