What a shambles

Le Fidèle [lit. trans. The Faithful] is an absolute mess of a film, and one of the most egregious examples I've ever encountered of a narrative systematically undermining and imploding in on top of itself, unable to bear the weight of a litany of clichés, melodrama, and inexplicable decisions (on the part of both the filmmakers and the characters). Imagine, if you will, an evil projectionist sitting in his projection booth trying to think of ways to be evil. He's not too imaginative, so about the only thing he can come up with is showing Michael Mann's Heat (1995), and instead of the final reel of that film, the evil projectionist splices in the last reel of James L. Brooke's Terms of Endearment (1983) or Gary Marshall's Beaches (1988). The incongruity between the first 90 or so minutes of Fidèle and the last half-hour is no less jolting or ridiculous, as the script inexplicably morphs from a heist movie into a pseudo disease-of-the-week based tearjerker that is so bad, yet so earnest, so enraptured with itself and convinced of its own profundity, I kept expecting Kirk Cameron to pop up.

For my complete review, please visit: https://boxd.it/urZDd