Better Late Then Never

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Here is a really original idea for a movie. Bruno Davert is a French expert in a profession that falls victim to consolidation and lay-offs. His losing the job does not really seem to affect his material life, thanks maybe to the French or European safety net, but does hurt him in his personal life and pride of being the main income provider in the home. He loves his family, he is ready to fight for his dignity, so he will do the normal thing that one can do in his situation - he draws a list of his competitors - one holding the only remaining dream position and the other five best competitors who are jobless as he is and ... starts eliminating them.Costa Gavras, the director of the big political causes touches here an important issue of our days which hurts badly a lot of people. The nice thing is that he is doing it in a way that combines black humor and compassion, and in a minor mode that does not allow us to really hate the serial killer hero of the story. Jose Garcia is cast in the main role, and as the whole cast he plays in a minor and day-to-day manner that gives the impression that the terrible deeds happening under our eyes are the norm in a society that lost its human logic. This film is not a shocker when you see it, it is actually quite entertaining and funny to watch sometimes, but makes you reflect at the real situation described here more after the movie than during the screening. Which is not small thing to achieve I believe.

As a fan of previous Costa-Gavras films, I was disappointed in this most recent effort. I was doubly dismayed that nearly everyone who reviewed it here seems to have missed the point entirely.Here's a sample from another IMDb user: "In USA (as far as I know), for instance, some unemployed people live on the streets or under the bridges." That's brilliant; thanks for the speculative remark about the USA of your imagination. "The Ax" asks us to feel sympathy for an upper-middle-class employee who's been fired from his job. He drives a nice car, has a nice family, and lives in a nice big house in the suburbs of Strasbourg.(He also doesn't have a cell phone and rarely checks e-mail, apparently, even though this film was made in 2005.) Others in his situation -- those whom he decides to kill -- are similarly privileged, likely supplemented by a generous severance package. One of our main character's victims refers to his maid and drives a Mercedes. So you're unemployed, looking for work, and generally despondent about life. Which is it: Are you going to actively seek a new job or will you whine about it while fooling yourself that maintaining your old, excessive way of life is still possible? The "critique" of this film -- that "Anglo-Saxon liberalism" is destroying people's livelihoods and creating an ever-more-consumeristic, violent, and oversexualized society, is precisely wrong. Yes, unemployment is a major problem in France, but you needn't look to the posh neighborhoods of Alsace-Lorraine to explore it. How about les banlieues surrounding Paris, where steep unemployment rates help to drive despair and actual violence among the immigrant youth? Yet the remedy to this very real problem -- loosening some of the restrictions of France's extremely rigid labor market -- is precisely what Costa-Gavras argues against, in the name of social justice. The bizarre and manufactured "class solidarity" among the upper-middle-class former paper employees in the film is a weird perversion of "Fight Club"'s blue-collar ethos, a mentality we're encouraged to agree with at the unspoken expense of the actual poor and downtrodden of French society.Give me a break. Costa-Gavras should stick to political intrigue, not economics. There are very few situations in which there is literally one job position that everyone is fighting for; are we honestly supposed to believe that the skills and experience gained from a high-level paper job are not applicable to other industries? And really, after several different versions of TV's "The Office," can we truly believe the cloying, earnest attitude of the main character, who apparently believes that his job in the paper industry is helping society? The film negates its own premise, unwittingly, by pointing out the horrible downsides to France's calcified labor market and blaming the results on capitalism instead of the very restrictions whose abolishment would solve many of the problems it raises. A further sin is the film's acknowledgment that underlying many of these (very real) French anxieties is a fear that Eastern Europeans stand poised to take their jobs. That's the price of both the free market and EU membership, and a symptom of general xenophobia.Beyond this philosophical disagreement, the film itself lazily relies on unnecessary first-person narration and a complete lack of subtlety. (Oh look, the TV's on! Guess the tube is just full of cussing Americans and their guns, slowly infiltrating our pristine society!) And finally, the film either takes place in a bizarre alternate reality in which cell phones and e-mail are not common, or the filmmaker actively chose to set the story 5-10 years in the past (why? because of the book?). If anything, the story would be more relevant in the present, when the choice between Sarkozy and Royal presents the stark choice embodied in "The Ax"'s narrative.

... nothing else than that. Indeed, the history does not really explore the leitmotif of the film, in any moment. Probably, the two encounters with two of the victims (the waiter and the salesman) can brig more evidences about the real situation portrayed by the main character than the rest of the action, a TV movie with two much superfluous elements, badly oriented and excessively based on a fake tension. What's a pity for a film that it could be a good drill work of our "consumible" society.I can suggest a Spanish film "Los Lunes Al Sol" as an example of a clean approach to the world of people who after losing their jobs progressively become ... nothing.

I've seen "Le Couperet" and it impressed me.There is a lot of suspense.And influence from Alfred Hitchcock movies.Costa-Gavras himself came to my country (Brazil) to give a lecture and answered questions about cinema and his movies in March 29, 2005.He talked about how he started making movies and the French movies.In his opinion, France is a good place to make movies because the government helps filmmakers and there is at least 150 movies made every year.In March 31, an avant-premiere of "Le Couperet" took place in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.It was great to see this movie having Costa-Gavras present.Amazing.