‘Son’ polished vigilante thriller

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Neeson to star in ‘The Minuteman’

Director Christian Carion and his frequent star Guillaume Canet show off their very particular sets of skills in “My Son” (“Mon garcon”), a polished, if mechanical, vigilante thriller that attempts to combine the psychological deep dive of Denis Villeneuve’s “Prisoners” with the adrenaline shot of Pierre Morel’s “Taken”. Falling well short of those superior films, this limited-release offering – which did modest business when it opened in France back in 2017 – squanders a compelling performance by top-billed Canet, playing an absentee father searching for his kidnapped son in the mountains of southeast France. Themes of parental guilt and the effects of broken families on children are hinted at early but discarded in favor of genre pleasures, which Carion provides to increasingly formulaic effect.

“My Son” is Carion’s fifth feature and his first in a contemporary setting since his 2001 Cesar-nominated debut, “The Girl from Paris”. Since then, he’s tackled World War I (Oscar-nominee “Merry Christmas”, also starring Canet), World War II (“Come What May”), and the Cold War (“Farewell”, Canet again). He has a knack for finding fascinating true stories, then treating them with a bloodless professionalism that never wholly fulfills their promise. That’s also the problem in this original story, despite Carion’s unconventional shooting strategy: “My Son” was shot in only six days, and Canet was never given a script, only a six-page character outline and a green light to improvise. This winds up being the best creative idea the movie has to offer, although most audiences will wonder how such a risky concept resulted in such a generic thriller.

Whether Canet’s performance would have been demonstrably less effective without this approach we’ll never know, but he notably drops his eternally boyish good looks to chart the emotional descent of Julien, a geologist who bailed on his marriage and his son for a job that often takes him abroad. Julien hasn’t seen his 7-year-old son Mathys (Lino Papa) since the previous summer, but he arrives in the French town of Autrans after learning that the son has mysteriously disappeared during a camping trip.

Working from a script co-written with Laure Irrmann (who also co-wrote “Come What May”), Carion sets up the dramatically-promising notion that Julien’s guilt over his decision to “give priority to my work over my role as a father” is the spark that ignites his increasingly frantic desire to find his son. Piling on is Julien’s ex-wife Marie (Melanie Laurent, a real asset in her handful of scenes), who suggests it takes “more than a birthday card or a gift in the post” to be a dad. Marie has since moved on with Gregoire (Olivier de Benoist) who plans to start his own family with Marie and is curiously unmoved by the disappearance of Mathys.

Tossed

All this thematic pipe-laying and character work, however, gets tossed as Carion’s sole focus becomes Julien’s increasingly improbable one-man investigation. Ignoring police admonitions to stay out of the way, Julien goes it alone, revealing himself to be quite the detective, scrubbing through video footage, busting into homes and torturing a suspect with a blowtorch before skulking around the bad guy’s mountain lair for the final showdown.

It would be easier to ignore the ridiculous speed and ease with which Julien gets to the bottom of things if the reason behind Mathys’ disappearance was even remotely interesting or Carion had gifted us with the primal satisfaction of watching our hero get medieval. But his sensibilities are too conventional for that and opportunities to make us question our allegiance to a vigilante or imagine ourselves in Julien’s shoes are ignored.

Along with Canet (who directed the far-better French thriller “Tell No One”), key below-the-line contributors keep us in the game. Documentary-honed DP Eric Dumont’s handheld camera provides an almost constant sense of danger and uncertainty, while the darkly-textured score by Laurent Perez del Mar (“The Red Turtle”) helps insure that tension remains high even as interest wanes.

Neither a bracing blast of vigilante pleasure nor an absorbing character piece, “My Son” is most notable for being Carion’s second straight film about a father’s desperate search for his son. One hopes that whatever compelled him to hang two movies on such a depressing premise can be worked out in therapy.

Also:

LOS ANGELES: Liam Neeson is returning to familiar turf, starring in the independent action-thriller “The Minuteman” from director Robert Lorenz.

Voltage Pictures is on board to represent the movie at the Cannes Film Festival. CAA and UTA Independent Film Group will co-represent the US rights.

Neeson has starred in the “Taken” trilogy, along with “Widows”, “The Commuter”, “Run All Night” and “Cold Pursuit”. He’ll next be seen in “Men in Black: International”.

Production on “The Minuteman” will begin in September on location in New Mexico and Ohio. Lorenz directs from a script he co-wrote with Chris Charles and Danny Kravitz, about a retired Vietnam veteran who finds himself responsible for the life of a young boy being hunted by the cartel.

“The Minuteman” will be produced by Zero Gravity Management’s Tai Duncan and Mark Williams, alongside Sculptor Media’s Warren Goz and Eric Gold. Raven Capital Management’s James Masciello will executive produce. Voltage CEO Nicolas Chartier and Jonathan Deckter will also executive produce the movie.

Neeson is represented by CAA. Lorenz is repped by UTA and Keith Fleer. Charles and Kravitz are repped by Zero Gravity Management. Raven and Sculptor are repped by Robert Sherman of DLA Piper. Ron Levin from Levin Law Corp reps Voltage. (RTRS)

By Mark Keizer

This news has been read 5968 times!