93 The Fench Connection

Brief Synopsis (From Netflix)
Violent, foul-mouthed detective "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) pursues a suave French drug dealer (Fernando Rey) through New York City with Captain Ahab-like zeal. Featuring a legendary car-vs.-train chase scene that stands the test of time, the film won the Best Picture Oscar. William Friedkin's groundbreaking crime drama that portrays cops and thugs in a similar light took the genre down a gritty, realistic path that influenced filmmaking for years.

Jason


Blast off: one-eight-oh. Two hundred: Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Two ten: U.S. Government certified. Two twenty: lunar trajectory, junk of the month club, sirloin steak. Two thirty: Grade A poison. Absolute dynamite. Eighty-nine percent pure junk. Best I've ever seen. If the rest is like this, you'll be dealing on this load for two years.

This movie leaves me with a lot of mix feelings. Last night right after watching it I hated this movie and had already decided that it has no business of being in the top 100, but I don't actually think it was the movies fault. I've had some time to think it over and realize there were two factors that really caused me to dislike this flick.

The first being partially my own fault and partially the fault of others. What happened was a confusion of what exactly this movie was about. I had been told by several people this movie had one of the coolest car chase scenes ever and because of this constant association of car chases and French Connection I made the mistake of confusing this movie with Bullitt, which for those who don't know, is a movie that was like 15 minutes of plot and an hour and a half of bad-ass car chase. Now you might be wondering why this is a problem, well if you sit down to watch an awesome action flick and you end up with a slow moving crime drama its very hard to get out of that "I wanna see shit blow up" mind set and the slow moving drama seems much slower then it actually is.


The other problem that I had with this movie is that it is sandwiched on the top 100 list between Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas, two incredible movies. So I had assumed that this one was also incredible. Unfortunately it was not, and not only was it not incredible it was very slow moving. It wasn't until an hour into the movie that the plot was explained. Before that all they did was show a whole bunch of characters that interacted with each other, but I had no clue who was important to the story and who was there to make the important characters look good.


Final Thought- This movie was not terrible. It did a lot of really cool things. The most important being blurring the line between good guy and bad guy, but the movie had to many flaws for me to put in my top 100. I don't regret watching it but I don't think I would ever do it again.

Bryan

"You pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?!?"

The movement of this movie annoyed me. The first forty minutes of police work made me feel like I was the one on stakeout all night. The character building was interesting, and the acting was very good, but those aspects could have easily been slipped into a plot line where something was going on.
If I were to describe the plot the movie, I really would have very little to say about anything before the quote Jason used above. From the point on- from the testing of the drug to the climax- the movie was actually plot driven.

I liked the main characters, and the story had promise, but most of the movie was about them tailing some low-level hoods, getting next to nothing for it. I liked the scenes where they busted up the bar and made "milkshakes" out of the illicit drugs they confiscated, but I would have enjoyed it more if it actually accomplished something in their investigation.

I liked how the villain was suave and cunning, while Popeye was gruff and course. He hardly reacted when he learned that he had gunned down a Fed with friendly fire. It made me wonder what his reaction would have been if it had been Cloudy that he shot, since he almost did just that a few moments earlier. Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider played well off each other.

Final Thought- I vote no, it does not belong in the top 100. It does some interesting things, but there are much more interesting crime dramas. I find it odd that this would make the list, but The Untouchables would miss out.

Angel

"Hey you! Haircut! Where are you goin'? "

So were are going to get our little caveat out of the way. As mentioned above, we were slightly misinformed about the plot of the film and what it was really all about. As we were expecting a high octane, thrilling, car film. We were instead given a slow paced methodical, story driven, crime drama. And that is not at all a bad thing.

The French Connection does one thing very well. It shows a lot of the "grinding" that goes into real day to day detective work. Every inch of information that is learned about the crime takes hours upon hours of being out in the dark, digging in the trash. It is a different take on the genre. Typically the view will know about the amount of work that went into the investigation. Here you experience it with the characters of the film.

The other thing that I really enjoyed was the fact that the main criminal was supremely intelligent. He was not a mad scientist, or a psychopath, or anything of the sort. He was just a guy whose job it was to deal drugs in high quantity, and he happened to be very good at it. He was not a bad guy, he was the big drug dealer which made him THE bad guy.

Final Thoughts- To be honest for the kind of film it was, it was not really all that bad. Was i disappointed? Yes. Everything that I enjoyed about the film is also what made it slow and void of action. It was a deep, intricate film about how good people do bad things, in order to get a good result. But in the end it spent more time creating this feeling of an epic clash and less time actually showing it.

Alfredo

I passed out while watching this movie so I'll be opting out for this review.