Title: THE PREY (La proie)

Opens: June 7, 2013

One might guess that Eric Valette, who directs “The Prey,” was influenced by Tom Tykwer’s 1998 movie “Run Lola Run.” That one found a German woman needing to get a large sum of money to her boyfriend in twenty minutes before he robs a supermarket. “La proie,” as this film is called in its original French, does not follow the same concept but not since 1998 have I ever seen so much running in a police thriller. A convicted bank robber runs, a sexual pervert runs, the cops run, and one sixteen year old girl runs for her life all within the picture’s 104 taut minutes, the boots on the ground proving the audience more than a patina of audience tension. What’s more Laurent Turner and Luc Bossi’s screenplay has enough complexity to keep audience minds occupied and respecting the drama which, despite a few coincidences comes across as an authentic look at what happens when a man suspected of multiple rapes and murders charges by foot and stolen vehicles across 600 kilometers of gorgeous French topography.

As a sign of the film’s authenticity, we note that Jean-Louis Maurel (Stéphane Debac) is modeled after the serial rapist Michel Fourniret, also called the Ogre of Ardennes, a man whose own wife helped him on his string of perversions and who, like Fourniret, killed the girlfriend of his former cellmate. Truth is stranger than fiction when you consider that Fourniret used the money robbed by this former cellmate to buy a castle in the countryside.

The picture opens on a jail filled with corrupt prison guards who get their jollies by occasionally letting some rough convicts to beat the crap out of a man they consider a perv, namely Maurel. (I’m told that child rapists, killers and molesters are on the bottom of the status pyramid in jail, subject to beatings by convicts with enough morality to hate these sorts of men.)

The principal character, Franck Adrien (Albert Dupontel), has just a few months of his sentence left when he becomes privy to the information that his former cellmate, Maurel, has kidnapped his mute daughter Amélie (Jaïa Caltagirone). Adrien manages to escape from prison pursued by gendarmes led by Claire Linné (Alice Taglioni), who establishes her toughness by posing as a hooker, then beating up a member of the Corsican mafia during a police raid. Adrien, the subject of a major manhunt, is believed to be the rapist-killer, since Maurel has been released early when his wife Christine (Natacha Régnier) manipulates a young victim into testifying that she lied in court. With the help of a former gendarme, Manuel Carrega (Sergi López) who realizes Adrien’s innocence, Franck Adrien is in hot pursuit of the nerdy-looking killer while being hunted in turn by half of the country’s police.

The movie must have provided considerable employment for stuntmen who cling to branches to avoid falling from a cliff, jump on moving railroad cars, crash roadblocks and risk their lives to show that Franck Adrien would stop at nothing to avoid being captured by police before he could get his hands on Maurel.

Rated R. 104 minutes © 2013 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Overall – B+