Director Rodolphe Lauga doesn't have much faith in the audience. Or, maybe he thinks everybody who watches Netflix suffers from ADHD symptoms. Why else would he hit us with kidnapping and violence after just a few minutes into his new film, Ad Vitam? It's not that you cannot do something like this within, say, the first five or ten minutes. The thing is that in this particular case, this sequence looks like a shallow hook to reel in the audience, which is something you realize as soon as the film lays down its cards on the table. At first, when Ad Vitam goes into the extended flashback (10 years ago), you experience a tonal whiplash. What you see feels very different from what you were shown in the present. Ad Vitam, through montages, familiarizes us with the routine of GIGN (Groupe d'intervention de la Gendarmerie national) agents, making it look like a recruitment advertisement. When Franck (Guillaume Canet) lays his eyes on Leo (Stéphane Caillard), the movie turns into a romance. During a hotel scene, it takes the shape of an action thriller. These changes in tone feel weird because the scenes do little to invest us in the fate of the characters.
The opening scenes already inform us that Franck and Leo get married, and she becomes pregnant. So when the former briefly notices the latter talking to a colleague named Ben (Nassim Lyes), you don't brace yourself for a love triangle (the movie, anyway, doesn't go there). Still, you keep asking yourself what the deal is with this flashback - why is it so long, so loose, so blah? The writers - Guillaume Canet, David Corona, and Rodolphe Lauga - want to firmly establish the stakes and make us root for the characters, but they fail to achieve the desired results. Ad Vitam establishes the camaraderie between the GIGN agents by showing them with smiles on their faces. They laugh, drink, celebrate, and sing karaoke like inseparable friends. Yet, the bond between them feels generic and disposable. All this effort to display these characters as friends forever is done to just infuse emotional force into a scene involving someone's death. But even without all the camaraderie images, this moment would have remained as effective as it currently is, which is sorely ineffective and bland.
Ad Vitam puts us in the company of its characters and introduces us to their lives and relationships but forgets to add more dimensions to them. If we don't care about anyone, that's because the people on the screen look like cardboard cutouts. The movie, for the most part, simply goes through the motions to warm us up for a long chase sequence. It's the main highlight of Ad Vitam. Franck first rides a car, then a bike, and then we watch him paraglide across the landscape. It's all watchable, though it doesn't establish Lauga as a man of talent. Creating such a sequence requires a competent editor and a basic sense of momentum. A pregnant woman is present in this chase to elevate the stakes, and the tension, and we only slightly worry about her because of her condition. In other words, that flashback does nothing to make us care more about her situation. Ad Vitam, in the end, is just your typical run-of-the-mill action thriller. It's light, it's insubstantial - it quickly disappears from your head.
Final Score- [2.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times