Name: Chrysalis (2007)
IMDb: link to IMDb
Genres: Thriller, Action. Country of origin: France
Cast: Marthe Keller as Professor Brugen, Melanie Thierry as Manon Brugen (the Professor's daughter), Patrick Bauchau as Charles Becker, Marie Guillard as Marie Becker (Charles' niece, and David's new partner), Albert Dupontel as David Hoffman, Alain Figlarz as {Dmitri/Danis} Nicolov (killed Hoffman's partner), Smadi Wolfman as Hoffman's first partner Sarah.
Directed by: Julien LeClercq. Written by: Julien LeClercq and Franck Philippon.
The Three Acts:
The initial tableaux:
The Professor's daughter Manon is hurt badly in a car crash. The Professor tries with high tech help to reconstruct her daughter's life.
Europol Detective David Hoffman's partner Sarah is killed by a criminal after a fire fight.
The delineation of conflicts:
Both storylines are introduced full hilt early on. The rest of the movie bounces back and forth between the two until they merge.
Hoffman seeks revenge after recovering from the battle, and is ordered to partner up with Charles Becker's (head of French counter-intelligence) niece Marie.
Hoffman is an incredibly incompetent detective; he has a gun and he barely apprehends his unarmed nemesis. Then he's cut out of the case by his captain. Manon's reconstruction looks spectacular in terms of physical reconstruction, but her mind is clearly damaged. Looks like two failures coming up.
Nicolov, the criminal Hoffman was chasing, turns out to be Manon's mother's controller. So Hoffman gets his brain fried. Marie, her uncle, and her captain try to put it all together.
Resolution: The misperceptions of the protagonists are cleared up somewhat.
One line summary: Sadly misused scifi brain research.
Statistics:
Cinematography: 4/10 The focus is too soft; there is not enough light for the cameras used; contrast is often too low. Plus, there is the jumpy camera work. The colour palettes are consistently meager. Is this supposed to be a tribute to earlier French films? If so, who cares? The film looked like hell. Perhaps 35% of the frames in the film had every single object in the field of view out of focus. Jumpy camera work and insufficient light for the cameras are just as bad as Blair Witch.
Sound: 4/10 The dubbing is horrible, and there were no subtitles available on Hulu+. The sentences in the English dub script seemed to be written by children in their mid-teens. The adults sounded ridiculous speaking such lines. Credibility went out the window. The incidental music was either florid and forgettable, or loud and overbearing.
Acting: 4/10 Marie Guillard was poor. Albert Dupontel was fairly good, but the lines he had were not the best for the protagonist of the film. The sad dubbing even made me regret listening to Patrick Bauchau's character. I generally count on Bauchau for gravitas and a reliable performance, but not here.
Screenplay: 2/10 Defeated by fundamentals, which were so bad that I did not care what the story was. Further the story was screwed up by the dubbing. Some of the crucial motivational passages were botched.
Final Score: Four of ten.
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