JEDDAH: It’s hard to know quite what to make of “Ad Vitam.” Maybe because its creators don’t seem to have decided quite what they were making.
Co-writer Guillaume Canet stars as Franck Lazarev, whose wife Leo is just days away from giving birth to their first child. Franck is working a civilian job checking historical buildings for structural cracks (which makes for some stunning opening shots of Paris). A few days after finding their apartment has been ransacked, they are attacked by masked intruders, who kidnap Leo and tell Franck that unless he hands over “the key,” she will die and he will be framed for her murder. It all makes for a gripping 30 minutes.
Then the story goes back a full decade. Leo and Franck are trainees for the GIGN (essentially the French police’s anti-terrorist unit). They become ace agents, bond with certain colleagues, fall in love… you get the picture. It’s a montage — but one that takes around 20 minutes when it could have taken two. It throws off the momentum considerably.
Next, we jump ahead nine years to find Franck leading a team of agents who are called to a hotel where gunshots have been heard. Things escalate rapidly. Two perpetrators are killed, but so is Franck’s best friend, and his protégé is seriously wounded. Franck is fired.
But he can’t let it go. He gets his friend’s badge tested for DNA (explaining a notable focus on badges in the earlier flashback sequence) and discovers that one of the two perps was actually a government agent. A conspiracy begins to unravel. The key demanded by the kidnappers opens the locker where Franck has stashed the evidence.
Back to the present: Franck rushes to save Leo, and we’re back to frantic action, this time with mediocre parkour scenes and a paragliding sequence that is hilarious (unintentionally). Canet clearly fancies himself an all-action hero in the Tom Cruise mold. He doesn’t pull it off. Like the film itself, Canet is best when playing it small and gritty.
Credit to the makers for taking some big swings, but they don’t come off. And while “Ad Vitam” is entertaining enough, it’s also instantly forgettable.
