The Connection (UK Rating: 15)
It's over 40 years since Gene Hackman's foul mouthed Popeye Doyle burst onto cinema screens in The French Connection, a ground breaker of a film if ever there was one. The arrival this week of The Connection presents audiences with much the same scenario, the battle against the drug barons of the 70s. This time, however, the setting is France, and the leading man is a much snappier dresser - Jean Dujardin.The action's set in Marseilles - actually the location for French Connection II - and that's not the only familiar territory. Drugs are flooding into France, being processed and sold on for huge profits. Worse still, the drugs lords are growing in power and influence, extorting protection money from the local bar and club owners and infiltrating all levels of the city's administration - and that includes the police.
With its roots in a 1970s movie, it's inevitable that The Connection is very much old school. Not that it loses any visual style because of that, but it does mean there are almost constant echoes of other films - and not just The French Connection, with its lone crusader. Remember Michael Mann's Heat with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro? Pacino's cop only had one face to face meeting with his quarry and it's the same for Dujardin. The similarities continue, with the audience being shown the many similarities between the two men: they are, essentially, two sides of the same coin, but each has gone his own way. While the car chases may not be quite up to the standard of Bullitt, the nod in that film's direction is just as clear. Ultimately, the idea is a very simple one: The good guy versus the bad guy.
Since winning the Best Actor Oscar in 2011 for The Artist, English speaking audiences haven't seen that much of Jean Dujardin, apart from George Clooney's The Monuments Men and the occasional coffee commercial. Is he a one hit wonder, then? This performance shows he's most definitely not. He's very good as Michel, increasingly obsessed with catching his adversary and weighed down by juggling his work with his responsibilities as a family man. Just watch the scene when he breaks down in the phone box (this is the 70s, remember!).