Fast cars and quick fists
Lost Bullet, an impressively lean French thriller, wastes nothing in its quest to deliver the goods. Take the plot, for example. Lino (Alban Lenoir) has been framed for a murder he did not commit. The only way he can beat the charge is to find an incriminating bullet that the real culprit left embedded in the dashboard.
Director Guillaume Pierret, making a confident feature debut on Netflix, wisely does not get bogged down in extraneous details. The brotherly relationship between Lino — a genius mechanic lifted from jail to turbocharge a police unit’s chase cars — and his protégé, Quentin (Rod Paradot), does not eat up screen time. Neither does Lino’s barely-alluded-to romance with a cop named Julia (Stéfi Celma, of the Netflix series Call My Agent!).
Only at the very end do we discover that the bad guy leads a cozy domestic life with a wife and son. A lesser film might have spent several precious minutes exploring that set-up to humanise him, but Pierret clearly was not interested. Who cares about some rotten dude’s inner life? Lino needs to get that red Renault to the cops, stat!
Lost Bullet
Starring Alban Lenoir, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Ramzy Bedia Directed by Guillaume Pierret Now streaming on Netflix
This bare-knuckle minimalism extends to the film’s style. Pierret avoids the crutches familiar to many American movies. Guns do not figure much besides the shot that gets Lino in trouble, and there are not big explosions, either. Rather, the action scenes rely on legible choreography and fluid editing. Whoever directs the next Jack Reacher movie would be well advised to study the set piece in which Lino kicks and punches his way out of a police station, and the final chase is straight out of Mad Max in its heart-pounding simplicity.
The finale is open enough to suggest a sequel is feasible. It cannot come quickly enough.