This is pretty ordinary stuff for those not devoted to brainless action flicks; a kind of fusion of the ideas behind Assault on Precinct 13 (which was itself a remake of Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo) and the Living Dead pictures, this French spin on the Hollywood action genre takes too long to set up its siege scenario and populates itself with colourless characters with whom the viewer has no chance of identifying, but has enough enthusiasm and zip to lift it above the more cynical efforts produced by Hollywood these days..
The action mostly takes place in a warehouse to which an under siege armoured vehicle carrying a Mafia chieftain to trial retreats when it is ambushed by what seems like the entire Albanian chapter of the organisation. As luck would have it, a bunch of crooks are in the middle of stealing a couple of container's worth of laptops when the police arrive, and an uneasy alliance is formed between them as they attempt to prevent the gangsters gaining entry.
Now if I was one of those highly-trained strategic swatty-types with a security guard who knew how to operate a gantry crane at my disposal the first thing I would have done is place a couple of fully-loaded containers in front of each entranceway and sat it out in relative safety. So would you, I imagine. Granted, it wouldn't make much of a movie, but at least you'd have been safe. But of course this is action movie land 'pure' action, apparently, which as far as I can gather means that there is virtually no attempt made to give any of the characters any, well character, and everyone races around firing indiscriminately like a testosterone-charged stag party on a paintball weekend.
It takes nearly forty-five minutes for all the strands to be pulled together into anything approaching a coherent storyline up until then only the scriptwriter knows what is going on but once the real action starts, in the form of enthusiastic gunplay, the film does at least begin to entertain in that mindless sense that draws us to these kind of flicks in the first place. There's nothing very original about any of it although I liked the way the advancing mafia army in their night vision outfits resembled alien invaders, and the prominent and strong roles given to the two women and the plot doesn't stand up under even passing scrutiny, but it's all pulled off with a certain Gallic style by director Florent Emilio Siri, who has since gone on to direct action heavyweight Bruce Willis in The Hostage, and the film is also free of any misplaced sentimentality as it winds its way towards an entirely predictable climax.
The action mostly takes place in a warehouse to which an under siege armoured vehicle carrying a Mafia chieftain to trial retreats when it is ambushed by what seems like the entire Albanian chapter of the organisation. As luck would have it, a bunch of crooks are in the middle of stealing a couple of container's worth of laptops when the police arrive, and an uneasy alliance is formed between them as they attempt to prevent the gangsters gaining entry.
Now if I was one of those highly-trained strategic swatty-types with a security guard who knew how to operate a gantry crane at my disposal the first thing I would have done is place a couple of fully-loaded containers in front of each entranceway and sat it out in relative safety. So would you, I imagine. Granted, it wouldn't make much of a movie, but at least you'd have been safe. But of course this is action movie land 'pure' action, apparently, which as far as I can gather means that there is virtually no attempt made to give any of the characters any, well character, and everyone races around firing indiscriminately like a testosterone-charged stag party on a paintball weekend.
It takes nearly forty-five minutes for all the strands to be pulled together into anything approaching a coherent storyline up until then only the scriptwriter knows what is going on but once the real action starts, in the form of enthusiastic gunplay, the film does at least begin to entertain in that mindless sense that draws us to these kind of flicks in the first place. There's nothing very original about any of it although I liked the way the advancing mafia army in their night vision outfits resembled alien invaders, and the prominent and strong roles given to the two women and the plot doesn't stand up under even passing scrutiny, but it's all pulled off with a certain Gallic style by director Florent Emilio Siri, who has since gone on to direct action heavyweight Bruce Willis in The Hostage, and the film is also free of any misplaced sentimentality as it winds its way towards an entirely predictable climax.