[Samuel Le Bihan] should have Hollywood at his feet.... He’s more the French Liam Neeson than the next Olivier Martinez.
Comment
04/09/04
La Mentale: The Code (2004)
33 %
Reviews Counted: 15 Fresh: 5 Rotten:10 Average Rating: 4.6/10
Runtime: 1 hr 47 mins
Synopsis: Upon his release from prison, hardened criminal Dris (Samuel Le Bihan) sets out to eschew his past life and live a peaceful, crime-free existence with his girlfriend. Unfortunately, Dris's cousin Yanis (Samy Naceri) has plans to entangle him in a variety of illicit activities, and attempts... [More]
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Samuel Le Bihan, Samy Naceri, Clotilde Courau, Marie Guillard, Michael Duchaussoy
Reviews
1 - 15 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
Think of The Code as an episode of The Sopranos stripped of humor or much insight.
03/19/04
Unpredictable deviations from the formula ... keep the film interesting.
02/13/04
A fumbling tribute to the philosophical French gangster films of the 1950's.
02/13/04
Top Critic
A routine gangster picture with a lot of internecine turf wars and a rush of angry dialogue being spat about, accompanied by English subtitles.
02/13/04
This hack job simply apes the conventions of dumb, homegrown crime dramas.
02/13/04
The atmospheric, richly detailed La Mentale has terrific vitality with its volatile mixture of alternating camaraderie and savagery.
02/12/04
Top Critic
Although it offers no new angles on the story engines of loyalty and revenge, the French film boasts an intriguing milieu and the off-center, hair-trigger intensity of Samy Naceri as a crime boss.
02/12/04
Top Critic
If the plot comes off more like a reworking of Scorsese's tales of Italian-American mobsters, Boursinhac nevertheless shows a sure hand with his story.
02/11/04
Le Bihan locates the internal simmer of a man considering the cost of giving up the only code he has ever known.
02/11/04
Attends to a thick stew of (soap-) operatic emotion, turning each internecine skirmish into an occasion for melodramatic brooding.
02/10/04
Not only is The Code visually unexciting, it doesn’t seem to have a discernable point beyond trying to set up an elaborate shoot-out.
02/04/04
1 - 15 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
Around the Network
• La Mentale: The Code at Rotten Tomatoes
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• La Mentale: The Code at AskMen
• La Mentale: The Code at IGN
• La Mentale: The Code at AskMen
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