Mea Culpa (2014)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

I've tried on a few occasions (mainly because I have a bad memory) to watch this film but it is SO dire that I have never achieved my goal. Life is short! Don't waste it on this amateur nonsense!

I probably wasn't originally going to watch this French movie, but the plot sounded mildly interesting, and I do like to try new foreign language films every so often. Basically Franck (Gilles Lellouche) and Simon (Vincent Lindon) work as colleagues together in the police, but their lives have taken a tailspin. Following an accident years ago, where Simon was driving a car whilst drunk, they crashed, and it caused the deaths of three people in the collision. Since then, Simon has lost his job and become estranged from his family, and Franck has a guilty conscience. A series of murders have taken place in Toulon, Simon's son witnesses one of these murders, the ruthless killers are hunting for him, and the whole family is in danger. Slowly Simon and Franck come back together to investigate the crimes, catch the killers and save Simon's family. They detect a killer who works for a Serbian mafia gang, the criminals will stop at nothing to follow through on their mission, but neither will the two police men. It all comes to confrontation on a train, where the officers and the criminals come face to face, of course good defeats evil, but also, the truth about the drunken car accident is revealed. In fact, both men had been drinking, but it was Franck that was driving the car, he assumed that Simon was already dead in the accident, he switched his body into the driver's seat to save his own skin, when he realised he was alive, therefore he felt guilty, for breaking his family up, but everything is sorted in the end. Also starring Nadine Labaki as Alice, Gilles Cohen as Pastor, Max Baissette de Malglaive as Théo, Medi Sadoun as Jacquet, Velibor Topic as Milan, Cyril Lecomte as Jean-Marc, Gilles Bellomi as Andrei and Sacha Petronijevic as Pietr. It is pretty simple story, a disgraced cop trying to prove himself and get his family back after gangsters come after them, there are some eye-catching action, chase and shoot-up sequences to keep up the pace, but it is fairly predictable, the twist ending is relatively alright, overall it is an average crime thriller. Worth watching!

Also 1 star for fake 10 star reviews by the film company interns, and IMDb's lack of fake review blocking.Vincent Lindon may be an okay actor but, he's pretty homely, so I guess that he insisted that the rest of the male cast (all cops and bad guys) have to look really ugly. His character's wife and all the other women in the film are 30 years younger with great looking tea teas. Quite a contrast that makes the film unintentionally funny. So then there's a plot that his son saw a murder scene and the whole gang has to chase the kid down for the rest of the movie. They publicly kill many people before and after but, apparently none of the hundreds of those witnesses need to be chased down, just this kid, ???Shootings, chasings, grapple-fighting like a TV cop show; boring. If they wanted a hit, and since they obviously don't care about plot or character development, they should have added big explosions like any typical Michael Bay turkey. This film is less than that.

Incredibly awful film. They set up all sorts of back stories for the characters and then proceed to ignore it so we can have an hour of 'tough cops doing what they need to'. the clichéd ruthless but shot shy Eastern European gangsters, the estranged wife and weak boss who plays too much by the rules, they are all there to allow us a few seconds to breathe between screeching cars and running around with guns. But all this is irrelevant to one of the most bizarre plot holes I have ever seen. we are asked to believe that a whole gangster outfit put their lives on the line to chase after a kid who saw them for a few seconds. To find him and kill him they run through various crowded scenes shooting at cops with abandon, including a train where they can not only be clearly seen by dozens of adults but even stop and chat to ticket inspectors. A pointless twist at the end which has no emotional context with the rest of the film is the last straw. It makes it worse that it is clearly not made on the cheap. Really not sure how grown ups can get away with this kind of nonsense.