Le salaire de la peur

For almost anyone who studied french in high school in Quebec in the 80s one of the standard books was "La Dynamite" about driving a truck with unstable nitroglycerine across treacherous terrain and bumpy roads.

This is basically that but with guns and over acting.

Now Georges Arnaud wrote "Le Salaire de la peur" in 1950 so it's more likely that our "La Dynamite" was a copy of that, but it was amusing.

Beyond that, it's not a great film, mediocre at best, but it is mindless late night viewing. Maybe it was because the story was so familiar in general but everything about this movie was overly predictable.

New from Netflix, a film that is shot well, the graphics are good, but overall it is bad and here's why. From the very beginning, Murphy's law occurs around the main characters, everything bad that can happen to them will definitely happen, if at first it may seem interesting, but by the fifth case it can get boring.

The plot of the film lasts so long that we see the title of the film when we have already watched a third of the film. And the content of this plot is so empty that it does not affect the further course of events, we did not get to know the characters closely, and the plot did not advance at all.

The main plot revolves around two brothers who must heroically save the settlement from the explosion of a gas well. On the way to this goal they face all sorts of obstacles, from shootouts and chases to banal roadblocks.

The main characters are stupid and naive, just look at the scene where the explosives technician is hiding from the explosion behind a car stuffed with explosives. But the ending of the film can surpass even this...

In general, it's a pity to waste time - a waste product that has been digested many times.

This is another example of a minimum-effort remake by people who think they are being creative by changing elements from the source material so they can pat themselves on the back for their "creativity" rather than to better fit a carefully crafted retelling.

The original by Clouzot and remake by Friedkin are brilliant and should have been enough to inform the makers of this train wreck that they were out of their depth. Instead they forged ahead and proved they don't understand the story and characters or why the setting was just as important.

Instead of the Colombian jungle with dangers around every corner including cliff-side roads, fallen trees, rivers with sketchy bridges, wildlife, etc, they chose to set this in the middle of the boring desert with long stretches of flat, easily-traversed roads and nothing of interest to even look at.

The original opens with a hyper-patient study of the characters who will eventually take up the challenge, while Sorceror uses pre-Colombia vignettes to introduce the characters and their reasons for ending up together.

This one opens with a pounding score that can't save one of the most boring "action" sequences I've ever seen. It's shot like a Honda Civic commercial, but then becomes more laughable when one of the vehicles gets stuck on a small hump because the driver (and director) apparently don't realize they are in a 4WD truck (or understand how motor vehicles in general work). The other vehicle pulls up and they chat about needing to go, but driver 1 is adamant about not leaving behind the (pointless MacGuffin). The other driver takes off, but SURPRISE(?), circles around to push the other truck over the speed bump. So exciting...Not. Meanwhile, somehow the vehicle that was in hot pursuit is conveniently much farther back than was previously shown.

We get a boring shootout that is somehow resolved and then a sex scene that provides no character development and further demonstrates a complete unawareness by the writer and director of the setting in which they placed their "remake"

Yes, you read that right....just seven minutes into this movie and it was apparanetly clear how badly directed, written, edited and acted.

Editing First clue to a bad movie is when a very simple scene have multiple edits in just three seconds of scene. GUILTY. A chase scene was edited so badly that you did not know who were the good guys or bad guys.

Direction: The villain is only five seconds behind me, I ran off the road, get stuck, get pushed out and now the villain is about 30 seconds behind me. Stupid...just stupid. Oh, the the villain is steadily firing a machine gun and not hitting anything once.

Writing/Acting: I am about to lose my life and I rattle off a statement with the same emotion of ordering a soy latte.

Skip this movie.

I tried it because it is made by a director - Julien Leclercq - whom I have always followed and mostly liked the films and series - BRAQUEURS. But here, sorry, I could not make it. It is lousy, nearly laughable, a total waste of time. Julien Leclercq's worst film, so far. Where is the GIBRALTAR director? He seems to have lost all ambition. Actually this story lacks tragedy, it would have been gloomier, I would have liked it, because not every director is Clouzot or Friedkin...I can understand this. And from the first day I was informed of this "explosive" project, I was afraid. I felt like a beast inside of me growing up, spreading in all my body. A SALAIRE DE LA PEUR remake with Alban Lenoir!!! Oh My God !!!! And my terror was unfortunately plenty justified and confirmed. Run away from it. It is more dangerous for your movie loving tendancies than any nitroglycerin truck. But if you want an advice to appreciate this one, at least TRY to appreciate, please forget the two previous films: LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR - the genuine one, starring Yves Montand and Charles Vanel, and THE SORCERER, starring Bruno Cremer and Roy Scheider. Then, and only then, maybe you'll may bear this one. But I must admit it is not boring. AT LEAST.