Special Forces | Review

Rybojad’s Fictional Debut an Empty Husk

Director Stephane Rybojad, previously known for his work with French television documentaries, makes his fictional feature debut with Special Forces, a superfluous, timely message movie that flails itself at us with a generous amount of humanitarian well-meaning and poorly orchestrated combat sequences before devolving precariously into a survival of the elements picture. Assembling a first rate cast for his endeavor, this piece of journalistic championing posture play fails to enthrall on all levels, making this seem more like an adventurous piece of propaganda. Trying to be too many things at once, and not nearly well written enough to balance useless subplots, including a completely ill-conceived romance to top it all off, Rybojad’s film feels like an outline rather than a fully fleshed out feature.

War correspondent Elsa Cassanova (Diane Kruger) has been covering a hot news story concerning a woman named Maina, who had been sold to a man as a child. But when a cruel and grudge holding Taliban leader, Ahmed Zaif (Raz Degan) learns of the French journalist’s story, he demands that she be arrested, along with her cohort, Amen (Mehdi Nebbou). After she’s abducted, the French government sends in a Special Forces team, comprised of Commander Kovax (Djimon Hounsou), Tic Tac (Benoit Magimel), Lucas (Denis Menochet), Elias (Raphael Personnaz), Victor (Alain Figlarz), and Marius (Alain Alivon). The team locates Elsa and Amen, but, while under siege, lose their radios, and are continually thwarted from being rescued. They are forced to cross the inhospitable land, braving the drastic weather with little food and water. As their journey continues, the characters reveal their motivations for being there in the first place, the importance of the media, war correspondence, and the special forces team. Tic Tac develops a fast connection with Elsa, who reciprocates his feelings.

There’s an initial mirage of something meaningful in Special Forces, starting out in Kosovo, and quickly jittering back and forth between Afghanistan and France, but this quickly dissipates, nearly as soon as Else is abducted. Characters get to utter chewy bits of dialogue that fall out of their mouths like the ungainly ideas they were written to be. We get useless character titles on the bottom of the screen, followed by lots of landscape announcements, and finally, a day count as the special forces team travels woodenly through the mountains.

Relying on lots of heavy, intense music, and a laughable amount of long distance camera sweeps that catch our ant-like characters trekking, trekking, and more trekking, it’s hard to take the proceedings seriously when they can barely hold our interest. Oh, there’s plenty of combat sequences, but these are about as stale as day old toast. In between onslaughts, we get even more ridiculous combat dialogue, like Raphael Personnaz, in one late sequence yelling at the enemy “You’re as scared as me.” Bullets fly, then, “And I don’t even hate you,” before he’s violently blasted down. As filler, French star Tcheky Karyo appears as Admiral Guezennec and gets flashed to at several moments, his job to find the lost team. And then suddenly we also get a love story between Kruger and Magimel (easily the most talented performer here, embarrassingly stuck in a lukewarm role), perhaps meant to engender the second half with some much needed tension. But this only creates more disdain for the poorly realized end product. Yes, it’s painfully clear that Rybojad was careful to give us representations of Europeans and Middle Easterners not riddled with stereotype, but he also forgot to write them as fully realized characters.