CHRYSALIS (2007)

Chrysalis (2007)

Actors: Marthe Keller, Albert Dupontel, Marie Guillard, Mélanie Thierry, Alain Figlarz
Directors: Julien Leclercq
Format: Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Language: French
Number of discs: 1
Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay
DVD Release Date: March 17, 2009
Run Time: 94 minutes

Movie: * *
Disc: * * ½

This French sci-fi action movie works better as a sci-fi movie than it does as an action movie. (It would have made for a decent short story in the genre.) That isn’t necessarily a good thing though . . .

The movie feels curiously inert and static even though it clocks in at a mere 94 minutes. Set in a near future Paris of 2025 a French cop (Albert Dupontel) and his female partner are investigating a missing persons case. In a parallel story a brilliant medical doctor (Marthe Keller) is helping her twentysomething daughter (Mélanie Thierry, recently seen in Babylon A.D.) recover from a car accident we glimpse early on in the movie using a radical new therapy involving the latest 21st century technological advances.

One doesn’t want to give away more than that without spoiling some of the movie’s genuine surprises, but it goes without saying that both storylines are indeed intertwined although not necessarily in the way one would expect. As science fiction it offers some interesting plot developments, but as action movie Chrysalis merely regurgitates several clichés including the cop who loses his partner and then is a assigned a rookie, and so on. It also makes the mistake of throwing two drawn-out fistfight into the narrative. The first one is hard-boiled and harsh, but a rematch towards the end comes across as anti-climactic. One such scene would have sufficed.

Ultimately results are on the average side. The effects are okay and the cinematography boasts a stylish sterile grey / blue colour palette that is suitable to the story, but still leaves one the viewer wishing for the occasional dab of colour just to relieve the relative drabness of it all.