Fate of the Furious
“With action movies, you never have to be comfortable”. This is what Rémi Leautier, producer and lifelong friend of Guillaume Pierret, said in an interview as he approached Lost ball 2. If the two companions have long experienced their ability to stage fights and chases in ambitious short films, they were quickly propelled into the spotlight thanks to the surprise success of the first Lost bullet.
By attacking his suite, the challenge is therefore to put himself in danger, especially now that the respectability of the duo goes hand in hand with a more comfortable budget. On this point, Lost ball 2 succeeds in its bet and does not rest on its laurels, especially since he has fun taking up the structure of the first part and its most important pivots to transform them. Now that he has managed to prove his innocence after the death of Charras, Lino (Alban Lenoir, involved and bestial) becomes a cop himself, with the aim of finding the crooks who took everything from him, and bring them back to the police. justice.
Of course, Lost ball 2 does not claim to revolutionize the hard-boiled thriller (and some overly written dialogues do not help…), but the generosity of its approach permanently avoids the gratuitousness that one could expect from its action scenes. We feel Guillaume Pierret even more in possession of his meansin particular in its way of juggling with its referents and drawing on the heritage of Europacorp, while purifying its film of the tinsel rednecks of Besson productions.
From the first action scene, where a house is turned upside down during a dry and rough mano-a-mano, Alban Lenoir highlights his physical involvement, making Lino this solitary rider driven by a sickly need for justice. The violence buried in the character then finds itself exploding like a pressure cooker over the adventures, starting during a fight in a police station which transcends that of the first film, and makes one cringe when heads crash against car doors.
It pulls at real tatanes
blood red label
But even better, Guillaume Pierret knows how to best exploit this common thread via the hexagonal identity of the feature film. Until then, few action films have been able to capture the particularity of the south of France, with the notable exception of Ronin by John Frankenheimer. With Lost ball 2, its creators give this charming Occitanie a cachetwhether rushing cars through the civilian-filled streets of Agde, or playing with its straight, flat roads surrounded by simple plains and trees.
The very horizontal staging sometimes bears traces of a country western, at least until Lino distorts this prerequisite by making cabins fly in the air. In Lost ball 2, movement fills the space of the framebut never forget to keep this direction, this constant need to move forward, because his hero is only looking for one thing: to bring order to this adrift world, and get back on the right path.
From there, the film uses its stakes and its pyrotechnic effects as explosive metonymies of characters hurt in their feelings. Proof of this is this piece of bravery in the sewers, where the thwarted love between Julia (Stéfi Celma) and Lino is expressed in this chase where police flashing lights pierce the darkness.
Alban Lenoir, always on top
For this, Guillaume Pierret is well aware that the readability of his action scenes is essential. Lost ball 2 is moreover in line with the continuity of films at the John Wick, where the highlighting of real stunts serves to provide additional immersion in the edit. Although the filmmaker sometimes summons a frenzy that a Michael Bay of the beautiful days would not deny, its cutting is always at the service of its characters and their place in space. It is often within the same shot that we see a crash graze another car, or that an obstacle stands in Alban Lenoir’s way.
This thrill, this adrenaline remain the ultimately very humble priority of the team behind the feature film, whose passion is perceived as much as the obvious know-how, always at the service of the spectator’s pleasure. And at a time when quite a few camera illiterates are approaching the genre with laziness and cynicism, we can only salute the desire for cinema that transpires from Lost ball 2.
Lost Bullet 2 is available on Netflix since November 10, 2022.
