15 Minutes of War

Reading the reviews I was expecting much worse... Solid & realistic action film describing a real event. Probably less explosions and pyrotechnics than in an American film of this genre but it did not take away anything in terms of suspense and drama. The seventies feel and a certain level of amateurism of policing is quite well depicted.

Don't get me wrong, the movie is gripping, but seems the director/writer did not want to get into the muddy motivation of the bad guys. The hostage takers always cut short to state their experience with colonial "powers". We see the horror of children as hostages, but never shown the horrors of Djibouti children under occupation - which is the motive behind the saga. Welcome to 2019!

Good action sequences in this though tepid French war drama inspired from actual events. But acting and directing - except in action sequences - are forgettable, if not laughable. Those French militaries look too much like superheroes for some one like me. Look out on the way they can shoot one hundred hostiles as targets in a side show without even be hit themselves- excet in the foot for one of them. The overall topic is OK, only some directing flaws mess up the whole. The director Grivois had already made another film about marksmen.

The real events were much more captivating and interesting than those depicted in the movie , very bad script a lot of cliches which do not match with the time that took place the event (plus too many headshots like in a videogame) , however I give 4/10 for the historical truth of the creation of the GIGN and their good deployment on the field at that time, but otherwise the creators of this movie missed a good chance to make a very great movie

I would have love to give this film a higher rating as I am a fan of elite and special forces movies. However the movie gets off to a very slow start and really only the last 15 minutes of the movie justify the rating it received. But the last 15 minutes are so fast and so furious and so gripping that it actually made watching the rest of the film worthwhile.