The Prey | Review

The Chase Begins: Valette’s Latest Shows Promise, Falls Short

French director Eric Valette, whose 2002 debut Malefique was an overbaked grindhouse misfire (even though it certainly didn’t lack in perverse flair), has made his most promising film yet with the poppy, pulpy and generically titled The Prey. While languishing in forgettable material since for some time now (including the English language version of One Missed Call), Valette still doesn’t transcend B movie trappings with this latest, but he manages to use his likeable lead in a slickly paced exercise stuffed with plenty of entertaining details to hold your interest.

We meet Franck Adrien (Albert Dupontel) in the middle of sexual interlude with his wife Anna (Caterina Murino), though we quickly realize that Franck is in prison and this is a conjugal visit. It turns out that Franck was responsible for a lofty bank heist, and he was never caught with the money as he sneakily stashed it in some secret place on the outside. About to be paroled, some of Franck’s similarly jailed cohorts make desperate attempts on his life. But Franck, an overly trustworthy everyman, makes a silly mistake when he sticks his neck out for the accused pedophile that shares his cell, Jean-Louis Maurel (Stephane Debac).

Maurel somehow convinces Franck of his innocence, and thus, Franck trusts his new found friend with sensitive information about where his wife, daughter, and the money are located upon Maurel’s release. However, it’s soon evident that Maurel has double-crossed Franck when an obsessive and unemployed gendarme (Sergei Lopez) shows up with chilling information on Maurel. An evil warden and Russian mafia members lead to fisticuffs and a daring prison escape, and soon Franck finds himself trailing a cold hearted killer. Meanwhile, a tenacious cop who plays by her own rules (Alice Taglioni) is assigned to track him.

There’s so much going on in The Prey, it quickly becomes ludicrous once you take a step back and realize what exactly is going on here. The second half of the film, in particular, sees the narrative falling apart at the seams, wheezing to a clichéd halt that may not be a happy ending, but is certainly predictable. That said, Valette establishes a pulpy, engrossing first half of the film, which actually features some particularly well staged fight sequences. It may be slim on thrills, but Valette gets a lot of mileage out of the engaging Dupontel, a director in his own right who is quite well known for offbeat and under the radar action films and comedies. He’s quite flexible, reminiscent perhaps of a star that often makes similar choices, Francois Cluzet.

Other performers aren’t quite able to overcome the wooden stock characters they’re assigned, particularly Stephane Debac, playing a distractingly yuppified pedophile. The beautiful Taglioni is perhaps more striking, though hardly believable in her Amazonian super cop role. The usually reliable Sergei Lopez gets a hammy bit part as a conveniently placed person gracelessly motivated to catch killers because he is able to see the evil in people they try to hide. Still, despite even all these hiccups, The Prey plays like a fast and loose dime store novella, an appetizer that leaves you wishing for something more substantial, but has enough charm to coast by on.