VIKTOR (2014): 'All because of that fat app!'

It's easy to say Gerard Depardieu is trying to horn in on Liam Neeson's action, but this thing right now with old guys who kick ass with a vengeance really dates back to Steven Soderbergh's The Limey (1999), a film that Depardieu's Franco-Russian vehicle resembles arguably more closely than any of Neeson's recent action films. In both The Limey and Viktor, an ex-con with a will and skills that are underrated due to his age goes to a strange country to find out who's responsible for the death of his child. In Soderbergh's film Terrence Stamp traveled from the UK to the USA. In Viktor Depardieu goes to Russia, where the actor conveniently happens to live now as an act of tax protest. The comparisons end there, however, because one you recall that The Limey is a good movie comparisons are no longer fair to Viktor.

Every generation, it seems, has its great actor who goes to pot in the belly for reasons perhaps unfathomable. Depardieu, once globally plausible as a leading man, has become the Marlon Brando of our time, but now hopes to be accepted as an unstoppable force of destruction, and as someone who can still attract the likes of Elizabeth Hurley to his bed. Hurley is this international production's token English speaker, though everyone in the picture speaks English, with varying degrees of incompetence. Honestly, some of the Russian performers make Depardieu himself sound Shakespearean, but all too often the great man himself mumbles mechanically through his lines. Still, nothing that comes from his mouth sounds as awful or hilarious as the rage of a Russian mobster who blames his current troubles on "that fat APP!"

Viktor, our protagonist, is an art thief whose boy got involved in drugs, got a girl pregnant, and died somewhere in Chechnya. Viktor goes to Russia with a lot of questions and some friends to help him get answers. The Russian police are aware of him and give him some warnings but given their inability to deter the country's reputed authoritarianism doesn't look like much to worry about. Viktor's method is to have his friends capture someone (sometimes with Viktor's own help) whom he can torture to learn the next step in his quest. Since Depardieu obviously can't do much real action, Viktor becomes a mild case of torture porn -- more so if we think of the audience as masochists. I hate to say it, but the best scene in the film, or at least Depardieu's most enthusiastic acting, comes when Viktor is enjoying a meal. He loves to cook, he tells a shackled victim, and he apparently loves to eat before he tortures someone. Food gets him in the mood to thrust cooking utensils into sensitive areas.

Philippe Martinez, who had previously directed Jean-Claude Van Damme in Wake of Death and Val Kilmer in something called The Steam Experiment, wrote and directed Viktor. He puts more energy into his direction of a Chechen folk dance performance over the end credits than he invests in the by-the-numbers plot. Everyone involved really seemed to think that any sixtysomething actor of repute can make a hit of this sort of story. And maybe there was a market for Viktor in quarters where Depardieu may be a reactionary hero for his tax resistance. But unless he exemplifies some patriarchal national manliness for you Viktor will look like little more than a fat man's vanity project, and a sad one at that given the star's storied career. But if no one weeps over the latest Taken movie because Neeson once made Schindler's List I suppose you can't hold Viktor against Depardieu's legacy.

GOING PLACES (Les Valseuses, 1974)

Bertrand Blier's picaresque sex comedy was imported into the U.S. with an arthouse audience in mind. That's probably why Les Valseuses comes to us under the relatively innocuous title "Going Places," though the poster designer had the right exploitative idea (see left) instead of the more idiomatically literal and thematically appropriate "Balls." If an American studio had released a film called Balls in the 1970s, people would have a pretty good idea of what they were getting, and Valseuses would mostly fulfil that expectation. It's what we'd call a road movie, but without benefit of a car most of the time. Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere -- the former became a star with this picture, back when he was a relative hunk rather than an absolute hulk -- play a couple of boneheads who seem to be led through life by their peckers. My first impression as they chased and groped women was that this must have been the original for Dumb and Dumber, down to the ugly hair on the men. The French title becomes painfully literal when the Dewaere character gets his balls grazed by an angry hairdresser's bullet and suffers impotence for some time afterward. But just as he gets better, the film somehow manages to grow on you. You stop waiting (or hoping) for the guys to get killed and you begin to feel a little sorry for them as they wander through a strangely barren landscape. Their original obnoxiousness remains somewhat obnoxious, but is increasingly exposed as a kind of endearing neediness. If they seem like cases of arrested development, their environment of grocery store parking lots, empty resort towns and deserted beaches seems to be partly to blame, along with the unresponsive, uptight majority of the French population.

Even as a baby (above), Depardieu was fairly husky, but he grows fast in Les Valseuses and is soon getting around all by himself.

Indeed, Blier probably goes too far in suggesting that Jean-Claude and Pierrot are a life force that France may need to revitalize itself. Their perpetual horniness -- at one point Depardieu seems likely to take it out on Dewaere -- is a kind of lifeline extended to a variety of unhappy women, from Miou-Miou's frigid yet frequently naked hairdresser to Jeanne Moreau's suicidal ex-con to, perhaps most alarmingly for Americans, Isabelle Huppert's 16-year old virgin. This last encounter, with Miou-Miou assisting, is staged like a literal rite of passage and treated as indisputably a positive event in the girl's life. The girl had impulsively run away from her parents with the trio who had stolen the family car, and is left by them on the road to hitchhike afterward.

It's all good, though -- though Blier has the maturity to remind us that sex can't solve everything. A threesome with the two oafs fails to revive the Moreau character's spirits, and she suicides by shooting herself through her vagina -- an unexpectedly gruesome sight that sends the boys running away like scared children to sob in Miou-Miou's bed. Even then, I suppose it could be argued that the woman had a last moment of pleasure, a blessing from the knucklehead nature gods.

Watching this as a foreigner, I had the impression that Blier intended his heroes to embody something essentially, folkishly French. The music contributed to that impression; instead of the rock soundtrack you might expect in the equivalent American film, Blier's soundtrack is performed by the jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli, whose music sounds as unmistakably French to me as anyone's can. Are these essentially innocent boors the soul of France? The French themselves may have thought so; they made the film a hit and Depardieu a star -- and they didn't type him as a moron, either.

Visually, Valseuses is very reminiscent of those American films of the Seventies that utilize landscape and cityscape to expose vulgarity and highlight personal alienation. You get plenty of pretty countryside, but you get a lot of grocery stores and bowling alleys as well. In either case it's our heroes who bring emptiness to crass yet hearty life. The cinematography of Bruno Nuytten consistently nails the mood Blier wants and makes this a movie of memorable images. Ultimately, it's a subtle, tricky picture that you can take either way, either as a satire or a celebration of a certain incorrigibility that's only human. It's the sort of film in which Miou-Miou can rush out rejoicing to tell the boys that she's finally achieved orgasm, only to have them throw her into a pond -- twice. If you can laugh at that, you should enjoy the rest of the show.