Letterboxd — Your life in film

Le Guetteur is an Italian's (Michele Placido, also responsible for the wonderful La Sconosciuta) version of hardboiled french crime. He's recruited the help of three eminent leads in Auteil, Kassovitz and Gourmet, whome all together help sustain the suspense in an at times too complicated and ambitious story. When you have an over zealous cop with a never say die attitude, you're doing him no favours by throwing two separate bad guys into the mix!
Auteil is, as always, the cop (named Mattei, I'll by a hat and eat it if that isn't a tip of the hat to Melville), Kassovitz is the ex-black ops sniper turned rogue bank robber, and Gourmet is the wild card, whose story is best left unspoiled.
Placido has quite the job on his hands with such a sprawling story, and there could quite easily have been loose ends with such a realitively short running time. He gets the job done, though, if perhaps not in a fully satisfied way.

Although not a new To-favourite, PTU is still typical of the stylish director, of course with the "ever" present Suet Lam, now with an even longer "mole-tache" than I've seen before.
Lam is not what holds this film together, besides the director, though, that honor befalls Simon Yam. I must devulge a certain amount of favouritism here though, Yam might just be my favourite Hong-Kong actor, wich means any film with him in it automatically jumps up a star.
Yam is the commanding officer of a beat patrol in Kowloon, who dedicate one night to finding Lam's missing police issued revolver (Stray Dog, anyone?). Over the course of the night Yam must juggle disgruntled members of his team, Lam's own misguided efforts to pull his own weight (no pun intended), a persistent CID officer always lurking, waiting to pounce on any indiscretion and two rivalling gangs.
The story in itself is pretty simple, but To mixes in his own special brand of film making, and the end result is a fast, slick, colourful little flick.

Anders W Berthelsen makes almost anything watchable, but I could never escape the feeling that this has been done to death. Jacobsen's put together a fairly good ensemble, but the direction itself is poor.

It had to happen eventually. I finally took a chance on Eric Cantona, the actor. Weird seeing him run after a person and not a ball. Not that he ran all that much in his playing days either....
He's not bad, not at all, I'm actually inclined to see more. It doesn't hurt that Karine Vanasse (Polytechnique) graces the screen alongside him either. She's hot, in an athletic sort of way, and a more than capable actress.
The film itself lands on the corner of ridicule and implausibility, including a solid wtf-moment half way through involving the mother.