Guillaume Canet resembles Bruce Willis and other former models who played action heroes in the film Ad Vitam, which he co-wrote. The Netflix entertainment stars Kanye as a former Parisian cop who is forcibly drawn into new dangers linked to the shooting that led to his firing. By putting its hero through the paces of everything from parkour to aerial skiing, Rodolphe Lauga’s feature is anything but boring. But it’s increasingly difficult to take it seriously, as the screenplay veers between gritty thriller terrain and into the kind of bloated set-pieces more suited to James Bond.
The failure of these elements to cohere is exacerbated by the story’s awkward structure, whose middle section consists of long two-part flashbacks. The vague and ambiguous end result feels like a hopeful departure for a series that lacks the distinct personality to become one – in its attempt to be many things at once, it displays a slippery mish-mash of familiar genre concepts.
In the beginning, Frank Lazarev (Kanet) works a very attractive civilian job, rappelling down historic buildings to check for structural cracks. His wife Leo (Stéphane Kellard) is one month pregnant with their first child. When they return from a doctor’s visit, they find their apartment completely destroyed – and this isn’t the first time. Later, after the arrival of a suspicious new co-worker (Stefan Riedo), Frank is nearly killed in what appears to be workplace sabotage. Upon returning home, he finds himself and Leo being attacked by armed and masked intruders, who are somewhat surprisingly skilled in combat. However, the conflict ends badly, with the couple breaking up. They are both threatened with death if the mysterious key supposedly in Frank’s possession is not handed over.
At this point, about half an hour in, the story jumps back a decade. Then, the future husbands were fresh out of a two-year training program for GIGN, the French police force’s primary tactical counter-terrorism unit (which belatedly explains how a woman so close to giving birth almost overpowered agents in an armed home invasion). Their close-knit class of 10 plays together, resulting in many scenes of camaraderie between the protagonists and colleagues like Ben (Nissim Lis) and Nico (Alexis Manenti), as well as significant others like Nico’s wife Manon (Zeta Hanrot). Meanwhile, Frank and Leo move toward recognizing a mutual attraction, which doesn’t seem to create a serious problem in terms of professional behavior.
These characters are likable, and their collective atmosphere is less defined by ostentatious masculinity than you might find in a comparable American novel. However, a flashback disrupts the early momentum, jumping back nine years later to a night when on-duty Ben, Nico and Frank respond to reports of a shooting at an upscale hotel. The fatal consequences of this situation lead to Frank being discharged from the hospital for not following protocol. About one hour into the movie, the timeline snaps back to the present, and a few months later, our hero is now racing to rescue his wife from kidnappers connected to this shooting incident. It turns out he’s dealing not only with scoundrel criminals, but also with the fallout from international espionage that the French government is frantically trying to cover up—even if it has to sacrifice the central couple.
This is a very complex piece of work for a 96-minute film, let alone one saddled with confusing chronology that serves no primary overarching storytelling purpose. Also thrown in are the scenic but gratuitous use of famous landmarks as backdrops, an almost supernatural training montage, believably intimate character dynamics, a ruthless villain (Johan Heldenberg as Vanaken) and the in-house action stretching absurdly over the top.
All of these elements are fun in their own right. It’s executed with enough skill and energy by Lauga, a former steady camera operator whose previous directorial efforts have been more comedic. But “Ad Vitam” (i.e. “For Life,” suggested here as a slogan among GIGN recruits) does not begin to integrate its disparate factors into an organic whole, and instead appears like an unresolved compromise between warring business strategies. Do you want to be a classic expensive cop who mainly focuses on investigative and domestic details? Or a stunt-filled rollercoaster reminiscent of films like “Mission: Impossible” and “xXx”?
You can’t really have it both ways – though, as the clashing factors end up reducing suspense and emotional engagement, and the futile effort becomes a default Reason for existence here. If the intent was to provide Kanye with a vehicle that could withstand daunting future challenges a la “Die Hard,” his athleticism and preparedness don’t make up for the film’s lack of definition. Frank ultimately comes off as a somewhat generic character, less interesting than the various supporting characters we never get enough of.
Well-acted and attractively produced, Ad Vitam is a superficially uplifting ride. But once you stop, you may not feel like you went anywhere, or that the destination mattered at all.