Scarecrow-88 A young girl named Alice(Alexandra Negrão)calls on Inspector Anita(Asia Argento, playing a normal person..seems to be going through the motions)to help put her assassin mother Eva(Frances Barber..one evil bitch)away because of the torture/execution of a maid recorded on disc. The killer, however, had a mask and the voice was mechanically altered. Even worse, Eva is a wealthy, powerful woman no matter how cold-blooded she is. Alice will go on the lam as Eva's goons are in hot pursuit. Luckily for Alice she hides in the car of Hugo(Jean-Marc Barr), a freedom fighter for a assassin group called Liberty Bells, who we saw in the opening accidentally kill a child he thought was a soldier. Hugo will assist Alice in the search for her boatmaker father Travis(Johan Leysen)while Eva draws on her lover, the Colonel(Carlo Brandt)and his top mercenary Sorvan(François Levantal)to find their whereabouts. Meanwhile, Anita will be given leave by her boss to go on the road to find Alice herself. It will all lead to a final showdown in the secret location/residence of Alice's father..that is if Hugo can get her there in one piece and if he's even alive.While, like many of it's kind, this polished, ultra-stylish Euro-actioner asks the viewer to accept a lot of improbable situations(such as the bullet-ridden hotel sequence where several of the Colonel's soldiers attempt to flush Hugo out from hiding resulting in lots of hi-tech gunplay)and coincidences(Alice just happening to choose a talented, top-notch assassin's car to hide in while running from Eva's goons). I enjoyed it even if logic is completely thrown out the window. I liked Jean-Marc as the hero Hugo and thought Barber was effective as the reptilian Eva.

pclans1 This bloody yet stylish European action thriller is well filmed and ambiguous enough to allow your imagination space for thought. Olivier Megaton direction is thoughtful and holds this interesting picture together. Jean-Marc Barr is good as the trained assassin who becomes the girl's protector. His acting inspires confidence and credibility to become Alice's (the girls) savior. Asia Argento who plays Anita a cynical Police Inspector who also needs to protect Alice. This seems to be at the core of this movie. Both Anita (Argento) and Hugo (Barr) need to protect this girl for personal reasons. Although the film does not elaborate on Anita's past you can sense her empathy seeing Alice as the girl within herself. Hugo on the other hand is a loner and has become jaded by his past experiences and through Alice he finds a reason to once again believe in his own goodness. - PCL

jeremy-houssay The book is good. Written by a French author living in Canada, it mixes the innocence of childhood with the atrocity of warfare. The first is personified by a young girl trying to escape the authority of her quite unrecommendable mother; the second by a mercenary who just came back from Bosnia, where he experienced killings and genocide. The story is about him finding back traces of innocence by helping her to escape, to survive, and therefore to grow up. It is full of complexity in the characters and of permanent tension in the plot. It is the basis for an excellent movie.Alas, ladies and gentlemen, here comes the first part of the spoiler: this isn't an adaptation from this book, or at least it goes so far from the book's purpose that it's unbearable. First, it is untruthful. Second, and more important, the freedom it takes towards the book doesn't make it better, on the contrary: the bad guys look strangely unprepared, the girl's mother isn't a powerful woman at all and looks completely unable to rationalize the gang she's supposed to lead.More important, the girl becomes almost a secondary character, when she was at the core of the plot in the book - along with her father, the only convincing character in the film. Jean-Marc Barr doesn't show what he's able to do, and most actors (especially Asia Argento) empoverish their characters by forgetting they are excellent actors. The multiplicity of languages isn't rendered. And the final scene where Hugo refuses to stay with Anita, symbolizing his complete comeback to innocence and childhood, is turned into a strange enrollment of the girl into the pro-weapons lobby...In short, this story deserves another film, with the same budget, the same technical crew (action scenes and visual effects are great, especially for a French movie!), and more or less the same actors. But a different choice should be made in what to keep from the book...

jhs39 Euro thriller is flawed but mostly entertaining. Casting is a typical Euro-pudding mish-mash of international actors and varying accents, with some actors obviously and not particularly well-dubbed. Asia Argento at least does her own dialogue, but some of the voice actors here are stiff enough to be distracting, particularly the girl, who never really generates much sympathy since her line readings have all the emotion of a bored child in language class. The central relationship between the good-hearted mercenary and the girl on the run from men with guns is highly reminiscent of Leon, but without any of the chemistry. Like most European films shot in English the script suffers from frequent, occasionally laughable tin ear for the language. On the plus side the movie is quite stylish and the suspense set pieces are well-constructed and mostly quite effective. On the whole I would recommend this one, but with a more competent English language rewrite and a cast that actually could speak the language, this might have been a far better film.