Wonderful character development!

Excellent but underrated film

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Nothing great but it mostly worked for me. I'm very impressed by how much so many people seem to be able to read into this film, but unfortunately I didn't major in film, and I just don't see that much here. It has a kind of clever plot. Also, I like older cars, and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, so that's a positive for me. I feel so shallow getting so little out of a French film.I must say that the corny special effects with toy trains and toy helicopters pretty entertaining because it was so blatantly fake, not to mention a serious problem with plausibility as far as really pulling off the related stunt. I really like a lot of French films, but this noir-lite was a bit odd and soft-bitten. Still, it made for a half-way decent nostalgia hit for me personally, but I wouldn't recommend it to many people.

The moody opening sequence promises so much, the deserted storm-lashed seaside location, the carefully staged bank 'blagging' and the clever escape all bode well, but it's all down hill from there. The rest of this movie stagnates with a lack of pace, a lack of dramatic effect and far to much screen time given over to dreary details : washing faces, tying shoe laces. To make matters worse the big set-piece features a truly dismal special-effects train robbery straight out of THUNDERBIRDS TV series. Instead of keeping this brief and maintaining some suspension of disbelief it goes on and on and on giving the viewer repeated chances to confirm how unconvincing the model vehicles really are. And this is not the only poor piece of studio work; poorly executed painted backdrops feature in several scenes at a time when on-the-streets reality was already the established way to go. The story is confused, several characters seem superfluous and as the lead character, Alan Delon sleepwalks though the movie. There is laconic and there is plain boring, and sadly he's the latter on this occasion. It's a performance that matches the tone of entire film.

There's a lot to recommend in this French police procedural but it doesn't hang together very well."Un flic" begins in a dramatically windswept seascape on France's Atlantic coast, where a quartet of thugs rob an obscure provincial branch of a Paris bank. The heist is elegantly portrayed and ends in bloodshed but it's not very clear what really transpires in the violence. That sort of thing happens a lot in this flick (no pun intended). A second heist involves a truly cockamamie plot twist involving a train, a helicopter, a classically mugged bad guy, and some heroin -- and it makes no sense at all! Still, it WAS kind of fun to watch. Alain Delon makes for a handsome and classy police commissioner. Richard Crenna does well as the brains behind the criminals. The never-more-gorgeous Catherine Deneuve has little more than a bit part, playing a moll who works both sides of the law-enforcement fence.The film leaves way too many loose ends to be truly satisfying but I enjoyed going along for the ride, and, of course, the spoken French was magnifique!

Jean-Pierre Melville hit rock bottom with this, his final film, a drab policier about the symbiotic relationship between a world-weary cop, (Alain Delon, far from his best), and a gangster, (the American actor, Richard Crenna, not half bad), and the woman they are both seeing, (Catherine Deneuve, totally wasted). It starts promisingly with a bank robbery in an almost deserted, wind-swept, rainy seaside town and the set piece is a drugs heist on board a train but Melville doesn't generate any excitement. The relationship between the two men is never fully explored and the train robbery is filmed with a total disregard for realism, (it's all models and studio sets and very poor at that). There is also a somewhat tawdry homophobic element running through the film, (one of the cases Delon investigates, and superfluous to the plot, is that of a lip-smacking middle-aged gay man robbed by his underage bit of trade; Delon's informer is a transvestite). It's also haphazardly put together; you feel as if it's been cut down from a longer, not necessarily, better film. And at 95 minutes, it's still too long.