22 Bullets [DVD]

`The Professional returns!' screams the UK DVD sleeve for 22 Bullets aka L'Immortel in an attempt to pass this Luc Besson-produced Jean Reno-starring revenge thriller off as a sequel to his 1994 hit (and with a kidnapping subplot you can bet they'll try passing it off as another Taken Stateside), but it's more of a traditional gangster revenge thriller with a very different main character. Charley Mattei isn't a childlike hitman but a smart Marseille crime lord whose retirement is crudely shattered by an attempted hit that leaves him with 22 bullets in his body and a desire to return them with interest to his would-be assassins. After going to great pains to establish a multitude of suspects implying a whodunit element, it doesn't take him long to discover which of his childhood friends and cohorts is behind it so we can get down to the business of killing them off one by one inbetween the odd car chase, shootout and torture, all of which is handled with slick efficiency by veteran actor and sometime writer-director Richard Berry. It may be very loosely inspired by real gangster Jackey Le Mat and his 70s gang war but it's neither biopic nor a realistic depiction of the Marseille underworld and there's nothing new on offer, but as an undemanding star vehicle it works well and benefits from more than decent supporting turns from Kad Merad, Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Marina Fois.

Unfortunately Anchor Bay's UK DVD disappoints by cropping the image from its original 2.35:1 to 1.85:1 (and it's not a case of `unpicking' the masking to reveal more image on the top and bottom of the frame: from the widescreen extracts on the making of featurette included in the surprisingly decent extras package they've cropped off a lot of information from the left and right of frame). The English subtitled French DVD and Blu Ray, however, are in the correct ratio.

Things get off to a very, VERY bad start with Anchor Bay's infuriating DVD version of Richard Berry's crime thriller 22 BULLETS [L'Immortel]. Released theatrically with a 2.39:1 aspect ratio, the disc has been cropped/altered to 1.78:1 (16:9), which seriously interferes with every composition in the entire film. To make matters a thousand times worse, all of the clips and trailers in the supplemental materials are correctly framed at the CinemaScope ratio. The DVD versions released in France, Sweden, Spain and Canada are correctly framed, so why not the UK edition? This is COMPLETELY unacceptable.

Adding insult to injury, the film itself - based on a true story - is excellent, toplining the magnificently grizzled Jean Reno as a former gangster whose decision to 'go straight' causes his former partner-in-crime to order his execution (the '22 bullets' of the English title). Big mistake! Monsieur Reno survives the attack and isn't best pleased with his erstwhile colleagues, all of whom suffer the inevitable consequences. Cue scenes of bone-crunching violence and screeching car chases through the formerly placid streets of Marseilles.

An urban thriller which takes the facts in the case as little more than a starting-point for its own aesthetic, director Berry compromises the material by opting for rapid-fire editing and eye-straining 'shakey-cam' whenever the action heats up. But he redeems himself by focusing primarily on the characters and their interactions, before and after the excrement hits the wind machine, courtesy of Monsieur Reno's picturesque rampage. The balance between the film's commercial and artistic ambitions is judged correctly for the most part, and the acting is solid throughout.

Still, it's almost completely ruined by the cropped framing. We have to put up with this sort of rubbish on TV, but no one should be expected to pay good money for the privilege of owning such a compromised presentation. Good movie, shame about the DVD...

NB. The UK Blu-ray edition is similarly cropped.

Charly Matteļ is a mobster who's gone straight and wants to leave his old life behind him.

Easier said than done in the mafia world, but he's spent the past three years with his wife and two young children in Marseilles, getting to know them again. On the day we meet him, he's out and about with his son, Anatole, who spots some street theatre and is eager to take a look. Charly drops him off while he goes to find a parking space, all the while indulging in his favourite classical music. As he gets out he's suddenly ambushed by several men unloading hand guns and shotguns into him. Scores of bullets rain down on and around him, but only 22 hit their target, after which they leave him for dead. However, he's just passed out. It's a stark reminder for Charly that you are never out, until the day you die. As the subtitle of the film states, Spilled blood never dries...

There's only one man in the frame for this - his old friend, Tony Zacchia (Kad Merad), and it's time for revenge, especially when they kidnap and bump off one of his friends, Karim (Moussa Maaskri). Zacchia and co. treat that as payback for thinking Charly has gone soft, when, earlier on, he's taken out of hospital to meet with one of Zacchia's minions who, prior to the meeting, has been kidnapped, stripped to his underpants and had his legs set in concrete. Despite everything, it's clear Charly still feels a kinship with Zacchia as they go back so many years.

Charly tracks all of his old cohorts down to a meeting and tells them he's going to kill them all one by one - maybe tomorrow, maybe in six months... but certainly when they least expect it.

On the right side of the law is Captain Marie Goldman (Marina Foļs), assigned with the task of investigating this attempted murder. She knows what it's like to lose loved ones, as her husband was killed in the line of duty. So she has to strike a balance between wanting to do the right thing and ensuring those responsible for Charly's hit are caught and also in allowing him to do what needs to be done, which would mean compromising everything she set out to do in the police force.

22 Bullets is a film which passes a reasonable couple of hours, but it's not great. It's difficult to pin-point where the problem is - there's just nothing that particularly grips you or makes you feel this is offering anything new. However, it does contain some fantastically violent moments in it, which the director makes a great job of making these all look particularly realistic.

Overall, if you only watch one film with Jean Reno as a hitman, make it Leon. If you've got time for a second, 22 Bullets is worth a rental.

Presented in 16:9 and in 1080p high definition, at first I thought it seemed odd to be watching a film that appeared to be shot exactly in 16:9, which made me wonder what was going on with this print. While watching it, I thought 2.35:1 would be the kind of ratio that would've made a lot of the action scenes a lot more interesting, but the composition of the film throughout didn't come across as one where I was watching an open-matte print of something that was 2.35:1 in the cinema, nor did it seem to show signs of cropping that you'd expect from a picture not showing its full width. However, the extras show that the theatrical ratio was indeed 2.35:1 and further clips I've seen online do show where some very obvious cropping has occurred, such as in an early execution scene, whereas it just looked slightly arty in 16:9. I really don't get the thinking behind Anchor Bay's decision to release this version and it's a major, major fail. It's bad enough when this sort of thing would occasionally happen on a DVD release, but for Blu-ray it's unforgivable. Despite no other problems with the print itself, the picture scores zero.

The sound is in 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, for which I got the 5.1 DTS version, and delivers gunfire, dialogue and the score with no issues, but at the same time, nothing particularly stands out. There's split-surround effects for sure, but it's all so perfunctory.

The extras are as follows:

22 Bullets in Marseilles (5:24): A brief featurette showing the film's premiere taking place with chat from key cast members plus the director giving their two-penneth.

The Making Of (26:40): Director Richard Berry talks about the book upon which his film is based, as well as the original incident which inspired it, that occurred in February 1977 where the exact same thing happened to a man in a car park in Cassis, France, as well as other aspects such as the story behind the character of policewoman Marie.

Interviews: Five in total, here, presented in simple Q&A format with no-one else speaking but each interviewee - respectively, Richard Berry (9:27), Jean-Pierre Darroussin (8:50), Marina Foļs (6:23), Kad Merad (13:36) and Jean Reno (7:54).

Trailers: Just two of them on this disc. The Original Trailer (2:02) in the original French language and in 2.35:1 and a Theatrical Trailer (1:40) in 16:9 and a ridiculous American voiceover which comes across as a bit of a joke. Both give far too much away about the film, so don't watch them first... which rather negates the point of a trailer, I know, but I just wish they wouldn't put them together in this way.

The menu mixes clips from the film with a very small piece of looped theme music. There are subtitles come in English only, while the chapter is a paltry 12 in number over the 117-minute running time. But then this disc does have bigger problems...

Film: 6/10
Picture: 0/10
Sound: 7/10
Extras: 4/10