This film probably popularized the use of the Japanese word it is named after back in the day but it draws only shallowly from this exotic cultural reference. Similarly it has zero real emotional depth and a weak overarching plot. Still it is considered one of the most notable action movies ever made, being particularly well known for its car chase scenes. I also love its beautiful on-location shots. It is so great when American directors realize that there is so much more to France than just Paris.

American Sam turns up at a bistro in Montmartre, Paris joining a group of men together with an Irish woman named Deidre who seemingly runs the bar. It soon turns out that they are all ex-government mercenaries and Deidre is hiring them to do a job. The objective is to obtain a metal case that is being sold to interested parties in France and is heavily guarded. When the team moves to acquire the needed weapons and equipment, it turns out to be a set-up and though they all survive, Sam exposes one of the other members to be an incompetent amateur. Sam takes charge of much of the planning himself and after surveilling the team transporting the case, they pull off a successful assault on the convoy in Nice. But just as they lay hands on the case, one of the team’s members, Gregor, betrays them by replacing the real case with the fake one that he has prepared beforehand and takes off himself. Naturally this is only the first of many betrayals as many different factions are after the case.

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that no one ever finds out what is actually in the case, making it a MacGuffin in the purest sense. This is fine enough except that this lack of worldbuilding detail also means that the film never has to explain the whos and whys behind the various factions entangled with one another as part of the plot. We never even find out who set them up at the weapons buying meet early on and they don’t seem to care about it. Similarly, though the action scenes are slick and very well put together, the connective tissue in between them is very weak. At one point the team acquires Gregor’s location by tracking his cell phone signal which seems like a profound stupid mistake for a technically-inclined professional like Gregor to commit. It’s also hilarious how the film shows the French authorities to be completely incompetent. They are pretty much pulling off major terrorist attacks across several cities in France and the police is seemingly unable to even impeded their movement between cities, let alone track them down. There’s a half-hearted attempt at kindling some attraction between Deidre and Sam in here but it’s so perfunctory that it feels like a blink and it’s gone sort of thing. All these are good reasons why this is not considered to be a serious thriller.

The action scenes are indeed excellent, all the more so for being reasonably grounded in being what competent professionals can pull off. The film makes an extra effort to make the gunfights look realistic by having them play out in real-time and by refusing to zoom in too much on close shots. This helps prevent the scenes from looking too slick and glamorous. The car chase scenes too are every bit as good as this film’s reputation makes them out to be though they do go for a touch too long in my opinion, making it even more unbelievable why the authorities are unable to stop them. But most of all I love the picturesque backdrops to all this action. It’s unfortunate that there are plenty of shots with the Eiffel Tower in the background as well, like every other American film set in France, but in addition to that it also has the seaside of Cannes, the streets of Nice, and so on. This relative groundedness and how the action ranges all across France makes this feel like a precursor to The Bourne Identity in my opinion so the many fans of that franchise might want to check this out.

At the same time, there is no real depth here. It was a mistake to emphasize the character of Sam so much, such that there is no space at all to develop the backgrounds of the other members of the team. If they had done so, it would have made it possible to properly explore the theme of them all being masterless ronin, cut off from the various governments they once worked for. As it is, there is some attempt to develop a friendship between Sam and Vincent, the French member of the team, and a romance between Sam and Deidre, but they don’t actually try very hard at all and no one shares anything about their respective pasts with each other. I am amused however that Sean Bean’s character once again gets bumped off early, but at least he doesn’t die, being instead exposed as a fraud.