Chrysalis

A French cop movie with tinges of sci-fi around the edges, Chrysalis never really delivers on the iconic precedents that it so desperately apes (a hotchpotch of Blade Runner, The Fifth Element and to a lesser extent Virtuosity and Freejack, just with minimal action).

Trailing a slightly misleading marketing campaign trumpeting its Bourne series pedigree and affiliations (Alain Figlarz playing assassin Nicolov in this movie choreographed the fights in The Bourne Identity), the action is sporadic, though when it arrives it explodes out of the banality of what has come before.

The decidedly un-Gallic sounding David Hoffman (Albert Dupontel) is a no-nonsense cop who loses (quite literally) everything at the start of the film and spends much of the blue-saturated remainder clawing back his life whilst falling foul of an erstwhile government plot that is manufacturing natty headgear which is able to control the memories of those who don it. The Chrysalis of the title could potentially have been an intriguing maguffin, but things crawl when they should accelerate and, though there is a decidedly French edge to the proceedings in both pacing and coolness, you feel that this is a missed opportunity as the more cerebral aspects take precedent over “shit blowing up” to quote Michael Bay.

The performances are uniformly strong, but the pillaging of many superior films makes the exercise feel like Neil Marshall’s recent Doomsday, whereby the many homages tip the balance into the film becoming a pudding-like morass which just makes you want to watch the superior antecedents rather than engage with the current story.

Extras: Making of featurette, storyboards and trailer.

Released on 9th June 2008 by Optimum Releasing.

Written by Simon Cole.