The awful truth I would rather not admit to as someone who used to very regularly write about movies and still does edit an objectively excellent website about movies is that it has been increasingly harder for me to finish watching movies. Due to physical pain or emotional pain or both, I have trouble sitting still with my own thoughts lately, let alone someone else’s thoughts.
That’s only to say this disclaimer should go in front of my two cents on every movie I comment on for the foreseeable future. If I made it all the way through, that’s already a vote of confidence from me to you. (Except RENFIELD. I couldn’t stand even a minute of that movie but… hey, made it through!)
I couldn’t sleep last night so I watched AKA. (Netflix’s autoplay preview showed the hero doling out a sweet trachea jab and sometimes it really is that simple.) I am now a person who watches a movie like AKA and thinks “that guy looks familiar” about the lead actor when I used to be able to immediately recall that he looks familiar because I saw him in both (excellent) LOST BULLET movies. I am no longer working with the same mental acuity, though I surely hope to regain it, even a little. Anyway “that guy” is Alban Lenoir, a French actor and stuntman who is one of many things that I was impressed by about AKA. But grain of salt again, because I was halfway through the movie AKA and still looking for a character named or nicknamed “Aka.” (It’s “AKA” as in “A.K.A.” since our protagonist is a sort of undercover super agent who in this mission is using his original identity from birth for the first time in a long time.)
The story is about Adam Franco, a man created from trauma but having used it as a kiln to hone himself into a human precision tool of murder. When we first meet the character, he has gone undercover as a journalist in Libya, having allowed himself to be captured in order to get close to another captive, but (here’s a spoiler) not to save her.
The subsequent mission is back home in France, where a Sudanese national and supposed terrorist poses a threat to the men who the man who Franco works for works for. The boy Franco at 15 committed an act of violence out of trauma that so impressed his soon-to-be handler in its suicidal bravery that he was recruited and put to work committing multiple murders for state and country. The grown Franco takes back that identity for the latest assignment, again because his notoriety as a youth is sure to impress the sort of men who are impressed by acts of violence that anyone else would see as tragedy.
Franco gets in with a career criminal (former soccer player Eric Cantona) who may be able to connect him with the supposed terrorist, and in the process befriends the elementary-school-aged son of that crime boss. So yes, absolutely, we do get scenes of the kid being bullied and his lethal protector encouraging him to learn to fight (extra points for the excellently nasty way Franco deals with one of the nastier little shits) and hell, maybe along the way we may be tempted to think that this coiled muscle of a man may be in his way a better father figure than the boy’s father could ever be. Yes, sure, this movie gives us that. Sure.
But what interests me about AKA is how the movie sort of picks up and toys with movie clichés and then drops them once it notices that the cliches are dead, the way 1933’s King Kong plays with the dinosaur he just killed. That could be a tortured metaphor but what I’m trying to say is that this movie uses a healthy amount of elements you’ve seen before but quickly abandons interest in them — not in a thoughtless or inefficient way, but so much the opposite. Like Franco dropping endless scores of antagonists with merciless headshots, AKA cycles through themes and plot elements and stock characters in an excellently brutal way that sort of lays bare the entire genre.
AKA’s approach is surprising, and welcome, if you ask me — Franco does care for and mentor the boy and that’s absolutely one focus of the movie and the one in the IMDb synopsis, by the way (“A steely special ops agent finds his morality put to the test when he infiltrates a crime syndicate and unexpectedly bonds with the boss’s young son”) — but by movie’s end, there is a child he saves who is infinitely more meaningful to his redemption, such as it is, and she’s not the one anyone could have expected. AKA is a movie that plays around with old chestnuts, but chops them up and comes up with a couple chestnut-flavored delicacies you wouldn’t have ever thought you’d be into. I mean, who likes to eat chestnuts?
Another thing I really did love about this movie, and please believe me I am saying this as such a severe lifelong action-movie fan: I am not sure I could name many more action movies that show how meaningless the entire enterprise of violence is. (THE WILD BUNCH? Maybe. HARD BOILED? Probably not. UNFORGIVEN? Probably. Rare company and I’m not saying this movie is sharing that air, but I am liking the ambition.) AKA has some satisfying kills, but far more of them that leave the invested viewer feeling how truly little is gained by killing. The bodies pile up tremendously and in the end, yes, one conspiracy is exposed, and more than one absolute bastard is put to a rightful end. But so many more than one loyal ally and unexpected likable character and innocent bystander and relative of villain who didn’t have anything to do with evil plans ends up dead in this movie. And for what? For what?
As that nice lady in MAGNOLIA said, for what? For what? For what? For what? For what? Huh? Tell me for what. No, tell me for what.
Kill the bad guys and kill them and kill more and kill and kill and kill again, and yeah it looks cool on film, but for what? Clint killed a ton of dudes and did how many DIRTY HARRY movies? but in the end, you’re that old guy in GRAN TORINO. Does anything look sadder than Denzel in that EQUALIZER 3 trailer? And that’s Denzel! John Wick got the guy who killed his dog three movies ago, you know? Where does all this killing get us? I love the JOHN WICK movies as much as anyone and more than most, but man do I love it too when an action film gives me all the carnage I crave but then also leaves me wondering why I craved it so hard. AKA does that. Anyway, it did for me. Blood-red meat that satisfies as a meal but leaves you at least briefly considering the vegan lifestyle as you leave the restaurant. That is something.
Press play.
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Tags: Action Film, Alban Lenoir, Eric Cantona, Etienne Forget, Explosions, Florent Astolfi, France, Guns, Kevin Layne, Lucille Guillaume, Morgan S. Dalibert, Movie Diary, Netlix, Noé Chabbat, Philippe Résimont, Saïdou Camara, Steve Tientcheu, Sveva Alviti, Thibault de Montalembert
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