Although deceptively simple, a good action movie is hard to achieve. There’s the choreography of the death-defying stunts and the mile-a-second car chases to worry about, and we’ve yet to get to the characters. We don’t need too much backstory to get the action rolling, but we need enough stakes to follow our heroes jumping through windows and entering into one gunfight after another. Too little narrative, and unless you’re here for fight scenes—which might be what draws you to seek out these movies in the first place—there’s little to keep your attention between fisticuffs and shoot outs. It’s a delicate, high-octave, high-wire act that soars or falls flat, sometimes too literally.
Rodolphe Lauga’s French action thriller “Ad Vitam” has its moments of excitement, but its threadbare plot between actions scenes fails to keep the heart racing. In the movie, Franck (Guillaume Canet) survives an attempted murder at work only to come home and find attackers invading his home to kidnap his very pregnant wife, Léo (Stéphane Caillard). In a flashback, we learn the couple met when training for the French Elite Intervention Squad (GIGN), and despite the dangers of their job, find love. Unfortunately, Franck’s career is cut short when he fails to follow orders during a call that costs two men in his charge their lives. Now, he must connect the dots between the past and the present and save his kidnapped wife while evading the rest of France’s police force that’s looking for him for a suspected murder case.
The details in “Ad Vitam” feel more thrown together than carefully constructed. Co-written by Canet, Lauga, and David Corona, the story came across as so vague, it felt like the plot was an afterthought to the fight and chase scenes. Even the well-tread cliche of “action hero must save a female loved one from danger” doesn’t feel especially novel here. Although Léo is a trained GIGN fighter, and she has a few moments to show off Caillard’s action chops, she remains mostly a damsel in distress. Similarly, secondary characters like Franck’s close GIGN buddy, Nico (Alexis Manenti), his wife Manon (Zita Hanrot), and present-day backup Ben (Nassim Lyes) serve their on-screen purpose and exit so that director Lauga can get back to the action.
As our dashing lead, Franck, Canet underperforms. He’s somber but without the burn-it-all-down intensity of Liam Neeson in “Taken” or the cocky bravado of Jason Statham. He plays the character too smoothly, too unflappable—only later do the emotions seem to show up. Come on, strangers in tactical gear have kidnapped your pregnant wife; let’s see some feelings! His performance aims for Tom Cruise’s cool character in the “Mission: Impossible” series but lands closer to Gerard Butler’s in his action movies—seriously focused, but relatively one note.
Unfortunately, some of the stunts filmed in Paris (and, impressively, Versailles) in the movie come off as unbelievable, almost schlocky—flying too close to the sun of “Gymkata.” At one point, one of Franck’s superiors mentions his climbing prowess like his father before him, and there are a few scenes of Franck climbing buildings. Later, Franck happens to come across a flying air rig at just the right moment to escape, and later, uses the rig to intervene with pitch-perfect timing. In a sense, “Ad Vitam” looks like it’s aiming to be a cross between a cop drama, “Taken” and “The Fugitive,” but without the moments or characters that make those movies unforgettable.
“Ad Vitam,” which in Latin means “for life,” is at times brisk but narratively unclear, delivers its share of action, but not the characters to keep you emotionally invested. There’s a detached mood over the proceedings, perhaps because of the story’s structure, which starts with an attempted murder and successful wife kidnapping before shifting back in time to their origin story, only to end up back at the present. Although Lauga and cinematographer Vincent Mathias do their best to inject movement and motion into the thin plot, there’s too much missing from this movie’s motor to hit the track at full speed. “Ad Vitam” is made to pass the time, not to start a franchise.
