Actors: Marthe Keller, Albert Dupontel, Marie Guillard, Meanie
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:
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.)
This 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 (Keller)
is helping her twentysomething daughter (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 color
palette that is suitable to the story, but still leaves one the viewer
wishing for the occasional dab of color just to relieve the relative
drabness of it all.
