Summary
Ad Vitam has a barebones plot and dull characters, which shouldn’t matter when the action is serviceable, but the structure and pacing are far enough off the mark that decent stunt work doesn’t feel like enough.
Ad Vitam plays out like someone challenged director Rodolphe Lauga to make a very simple film as needlessly, off-puttingly convoluted as possible. It starts out great, with the pregnant wife of an elite member of France’s National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN) being kidnapped for mysterious reasons. Then it squanders all of that early momentum on longwinded explanatory flashbacks that comprise most of the movie and only catch up back to the present day for a perfunctory conclusion. Meh.
Why structure the movie like this? It’s very strange. I expected the sparse storytelling in the early portion to be maintained, sacrificing character and emotional depth in favor of solid action (there’s a vertigo-inducing rappel sequence and a claustrophobic fistfight early on that are both more than serviceable) like any self-respecting straight-to-streaming actioner. But no. Instead we languish in the dull past to overexplain what ultimately turns out to be an extremely simple concept.
The GIGN is an elite police unit, but when we meet our hero, Franck (Guillaume Canet, Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom), he’s in a bit of a slump. There’s distance developing between him and his heavily pregnant wife Léo (Stéphane Caillard), but while it’s obvious something is hanging over them both, it isn’t clear what. At this point, there’s no indication that either of them can handle themselves quite as well as they turn out to be able to, which is partly what makes the apartment fight impactful.
Why are Franck and Leo being targeted? Well, that would be telling. Because of the structure of Ad Vitam, the real reason isn’t revealed until, like, an hour in. But I can give you the outline. Back when they were both GIGN operatives, Franck responded to a call at a hotel that resulted in the deaths of two of his men, one of whom was his bestie, Nico (Alexis Manenti). Because of the blunder – which isn’t really a blunder at all, a contrived element of the script by Lauga, Canet, and David Corona that never really takes – Franck is fired, but whatever he interrupted at the hotel turns out to have been much more important than anyone realized. That’s the gist.
But the longwinded route Ad Vitam takes to get here is painful. We have to sit through all of Franck’s police training (in montage, naturally), his meet-cute with Leo, the training of another agent named Ben (Nassim Lyes, the comically handsome guy from Under Paris), and then a lot of friendly merry-making to highlight how close of a relationship Franck and Leo had with Nico and his wife Manon (Zita Hanrot – The Hook Up Plan, School Life). It’s supposed to make us care more about Nico’s death. It doesn’t.
Because this is all coming after the strong opening act, it completely sucks the life out of the movie. By the time we returned to the present day I’d almost forgotten why we were supposed to care. But by that point, there’s only enough time left in the movie for the climactic chases, fights, and shootouts that are obligatory in the genre. You don’t care about anyone involved, but the construction of this stuff is, at least, pretty good. That’s until a sequence involving Franck and a rather unconventional escape vehicle pushes the idea of “novel” into the realms of ridiculousness.
You can tell Ad Vitam is trying to evoke the tough guy family rescue vibe from Taken and the high-wire stunt work from Mission: Impossible, neither of which make for favorable comparisons, at least in part because it inexplicably becomes Police Academy for the entire second act.
Better characters might have helped. Franck is supposed to be beaten down and stoic, but Canet interprets that as utterly emotionless, so he often seems like he can’t be bothered rescuing Leo at all. Caillard is solid and Leo gets some fun action despite being nine months pregnant, but she’s dry in the flashbacks and spends too much time as a damsel in the present day. Lyes may well just be there for aesthetic value, but fair enough. If you need a Frenchman who looks cool shooting dudes, he’s your man.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t go into Ad Vitam expecting Oscar-worthy performances, or even anything beyond what it provides. But I did expect it to provide that in an easily digestible and exciting way. There’s nothing wrong with action movies that have no ambitions beyond great action – see The Raid and its sequel, two of the finest action movies ever – but there is something wrong with action movies that can’t even apply basic storytelling fundamentals to an exceedingly simple premise. In those cases, the action isn’t enough.
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