Rabid Dogs, 2015.
Directed by Éric Hannezo.
Starring Lambert Wilson, Virginie Ledoyen, Guillaume Gouix, François Arnaud, Franck Gastambide and Laurent Lucas.
SYNOPSIS:
After a botched robbery attempt, the criminal gang kidnap three hostages and take to the road.
It’s a brave move to try and remake a movie by a cinematic master such as Mario Bava but French filmmaker Éric Hannezo has given it a shot with an updated take on Bava’s 1974 crime thriller Rabid Dogs, a movie that wasn’t quite as Bava-esque as the rest of the director’s works and consequently was probably more open to interpretation.
If you have seen the original then the plot is exactly the same (with one or two small deviance’s) but in case you have never seen Bava’s film then Rabid Dogs begins with a bank heist in an undisclosed French city bank. The four robbers escape with a their loot after a shoot-out when the police are alerted during a protest outside the bank and the gang then snatch a female hostage in order to get away. During their escape one of the gang is spooked and accidentally shoots and kills an innocent bystander whilst the gang leader is fatally wounded, but before he goes he takes on the pursuing authorities so the rest of the gang can get away. They do this by hijacking a car driven by a father trying to get his ill young daughter to hospital for an organ transplant and make their way to their rendezvous point. However, tensions run high between the nervous gang members, the frightened female hostage and the desperate father and things don’t entirely pan out the way they were planned.
A slick and stylish crime drama, this new version of Rabid Dogs – credited as being based on the short story Man and Boy as opposed to Alessandro Parenzo’s 1974 screenplay – is a pretty taught and visually exciting thriller that only really suffers from the fact that there is an earlier version of the film that is grittier and, thanks to the time and place it was made in and who was behind the camera, arguably the better of the two. However, Hannezo is no slouch behind the camera and gives his film some genuinely inventive camera shots, creative mood lighting and time cards to remind you that there is an issue of time underpinning the criminal’s escape, mostly down to the sick girl they have on the back seat who needs urgent medical attention.
Echoing the classic heist stylings of Heat rather than the Last House on the Left leanings of the original, Rabid Dogs 2015 tones down the exploitation and humiliation that Bava injected into his film in order to keep up with the changing trends of the 1970s, instead preferring to keep the threat and menace bubbling beneath the surface, a move that helps maintain the pace and keeps your attention on what is happening. The cast also do a superb job and keep things moving along with some quite impressive performances, especially Guillaume Gouix as Sabri, the reluctant head of the gang who takes over once their original leader is killed, although the constant flashbacks to the gang’s beginnings are a little distracting and quite unnecessary. Overall, though, Rabid Dogs is a tense and sinister crime movie that marks out Éric Hannezo as a director to keep an eye on and hopefully we’ll get to see what he can do with more original material next time.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★/ Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
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Originally published August 22, 2016. Updated April 14, 2018.
