22 Bullets (2010)

There is a particular pleasure in encountering a film that has no interest in being anything other than what it is. 22 Bullets, Richard Berry's 2010 adaptation of Franz-Olivier Giesbert's novel about the gangster Jacky Imbert, concerns a retired Marseille mobster named Charly Matteï who absorbs twenty-two rounds in a parking garage and then spends the rest of the runtime settling accounts. Jean Reno plays him with the weary solidity of a man who has been shot before and expects to be shot again. The film is brutal, efficient, and entirely indifferent to the cultural currents that would later become unavoidable in the genre.

The Marseille setting supplies a cast that looks like Marseille, which is to say it includes North African and mixed-race performers in supporting roles without ever remarking on the fact. This is demography, not advocacy. Marina Foïs appears as the investigating policewoman, and she is granted a dead husband and a private grievance, which is more interiority than the average French procedural affords its female officers. It does not amount to a thesis. No character in this film delivers a speech about the structures that produced them. The villain launders money because that is what villains do, not because the screenplay wishes to indict late capitalism. There is a kidnapping, a cemetery, a loyal friend named Karim who dies, and a great deal of blunt physical violence, none of it arranged to make a point.

What remains is craft of a traditional and somewhat exhausted variety. The revenge mechanics click into place, the moral ledger stays simple, and the ending on the beach arrives with a voiceover that tells us the protagonist is at peace. We have seen this before, many times, and we will see it again. It is not a film that lectures, reforms, or enlightens. It simply kills people in the correct order.