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Overstepping the mark on familiarity tends to render most contemporary gangster flicks tired retreads of genre conventions. Unfortunately Frédéric Schoendoerffer’s French offering PARIS LOCKDOWN does little to surpass this expectation and as a result appears to go through the gangster motions as if ticking from a chart listing the usual suspects. With very little stretch of the imagination we are ushered into an unpleasant world of seedy nightclubs, explicit torture, prostitutes and rampant beatings and rape while trying to fathom how a plot with so many narrative contrivances could ever hope to feel refreshing.

Claude Corti (Philippe Caubere) is the ageing crime lord with blood on his hands and money in his pockets, who goes about his daily deadly dealings with typically mean gusto and unsympathetic relish. If people don’t obey him he expresses his bitter disgust by taking them aside and removing their eyes from their sockets or taking an almighty sledgehammer to their genitals. He has become accustomed to the high life that his status affords him: the exotic women, the highclass drugs and the expensive cars and lavish apartment pads. However when he is busted for possession of counterfeit vehicle registration forms he finds that he has to rely on his allegedly trusty companions to take care of business while he’s away.

All this somehow smugly echoes a reverse strategy of the plot of Abel Ferrara’s brooding underbelly masterpiece KING OF NEW YORK (1990), where if you remember Christopher Walken’s former drug lord Frank White returns after a hefty jail sentence refreshed and eager to reinstate his criminal profiting. Perhaps it’s a bit too much to ask but Caubere ain’t no Walken and as a result flaunts none of the edgy and unpredictable flamboyant menace that our famous Canadian actor bestowed.

When he vacates the screen after an hour’s running time the youthfully good-looking presence of Benoît Magimel (as Franck) takes over his predecessors’ role with such pretence you would think he were Michael Corlene from THE GODFATHER. The clutch of the whole story rests on whether Franck and his associates decide whether to keep things running smoothly for their boss’s inevitable return or gamely try to steal the business from under his nose. Well we already know which trail they will choose and where this will inevitably lead them before they do so no shocks here.

There’s welcome weathered support from the likes of Olivier Marchal (formerly seen in Guillaume Canet’s tense Hitchcockian thriller TELL NO ONE), who lends the film some nuance as Franck’s elder hand Jean-Guy. But apart from this there’s little in the way of substance to chew on in PARIS LOCKDOWN. The characters are bland re-trends of a million others you have encountered before in numerous gangster pics, the visceral shootouts are much more flavoursome when dished out from the likes of Scorsese or Michael Mann and the driller-killer antics of the torture/rape scenes carry more weight when viewed in horror torture-porn where they belong.

There’s a climatic walk away scene yearning for a sequel but with a set-up this predictable the entire narrative series can already be glimpsed through any number of previous gangster flicks, making PARIS LOCKDOWN an admittedly violent but pretentious and preconceived disappointment.

EXTRAS

In the superfluous 50 minute making of documentary ‘Diary of Paris Lockdown’ director Schoendoerffer beams how he intended this film to mark the end of a loose trilogy that commenced with CRIME SCENES (2000) and was followed by SECRET AGENTS (2004) encapsulating stories from the perspectives of cops, secret agents and (finally with LOCKDOWN), gangsters. While this provides a justifiable take on how the film sits in the grand cinematic scheme of things his initial intention to bring a more tangible rougher realism to the screen – favouring artistic ‘realism’ over digital effects and harking back to the style of 70s filmmaking - proves harder to fathom when the end results seem so routinely shabby.

The doc also covers how the director nursed an extended pre-production period and focuses on how some of the hyper-real prosthetics were conceived, while the majority of cast and crew give an insight into how they approached their various roles and interacted with the director. Nothing above the norm here rather like the film itself.

OVERALL

For gangster pursuit’s’ PARIS LOCKDOWN will nestle some interest but as a critique of French underworld hoodlum this film ultimately fails to shed any new light on a genre which is coming close to being worn away by cliché.