zardoz-13 Writer & director Laurent Tuel's "Le premier cercle" qualifies as a gritty, hard-boiled heist thriller about a pugnacious clan of Armenian mobsters in France. Jean Reno stars as the ruthless father and crime boss Milo Malakian. He remains unscathed throughout this well-staged dramatic shoot'em up. Nevertheless, his life of crime exacts a tragic toll on his family. Gaspard Ulliel plays Milo's handsome son Anton Malakian who isn't sure that a criminal career is best for him. He wants to invest in a small motel and raise horses. Anton falls in love with the pretty young nurse, Elodie (Vahina Giocante) who takes care of his grandmother. Interestingly enough, Reno's tough guy protagonist never sees the inside of a jail cell. When Reno and his larcenous family aren't trying to kill French police inspector L'inspecteur Saunier, they are feuding with each other over the girl that the son wants to wed. Moreover, the son follows reluctantly in the father's footsteps. The stolen car scene at the gas station at the outset of the action is neatly down. Reno's character has no qualms about openly attacking the police. In one scene, he recognizes a cop in a car near a dock and rams the car with the cop. The airport heist set-piece in the last half-hour and the son's struggle to go straight are electrifying. "Le premier cercle" is believable from fade-in to fade-out, and Tuel's 95-minute movie never wears out its welcome.

kaeng ...where the other reviewers watching? I don't write reviews very often. Most of the time I do it to do justice. To set all those reviews from a parallel dimension straight.Inner Ring is not a good movie. It is not resourceful, the ending is not surprising and neither Reno, nor Ulliel have delivered their best performances here.The character development in this movie is so bad, it will make you cringe. As is the storytelling. I am beginning to suspect that this is a French thing, as I have seen it before. Scenes are cut together, seemingly at random. No segways, no connection to other scenes. There are apparently huge leaps in time that the viewer is completely unaware of, until a scene just doesn't make any sense. You will think "Oh, I guess some months went by" and maybe even shrug your shoulders. And slowly you will begin to lose interest in this movie. The characters apparently develop off-screen. Which is a bad thing, because this is a friggin' movie! You are supposed to see what is going on. So the audience can build a relationship with the characters. This movie fails in doing so.I conclude with the plead to look at the overall rating, which is not very good. Please, don't believe any review that rates this movie higher than 5.

Wizard-8 Although I mainly watch American films, I make a point of watching foreign films every so often for variety and to see a genre possibly done in a different way. When I saw this at the video store, I thought: "Cool! Jean Reno is a colorful actor, and the video box art and the title of the movie suggest that this will be jam-packed with action and suspense!" I rented it, took it home... and I was very disappointed. I could make a long list about everything that disappointed me about this movie. For starters, Jean Reno is in less of the movie than you might think. And as for action, there is almost no action in the entire running time! Still, the movie could have worked by showing us interesting drama or colorful and interesting other characters. But that's not what happens. The plot is VERY slow-moving, with a lot of boring chat that doesn't advance things very much. And the movie looks and sounds weird; the cinematography has a soft, washed-out look you often see in French movies, and the audio doesn't crackle with life (such as the fact that scene after scene goes by with no musical score in the background.) In fact, the movie has more of a made-for-TV feel than a theatrical film feeling.I'll still take a chance on foreign films in the future, whether they are French or not. But I'll be more careful in my selections. I now know that foreign film companies can be like American film companies, promising something but delivering something else - and that "something else" not being very good at all.

Cihan "Sean Victorydawn" Vercan (CihanVercan) That statement of the Greek historian Herodotus chimes in with this movie whereby both of Malakian's sons were killed during gunfights with the police. Sticked in my memory; previously in Troy(2004) when his son Hector got killed, the King of Troy had gone to knee before Achilles and also very famously in Godfather(1972), Marlon Brando's character had endured in silence of his son Sonny's assassination. There are more examples to that case in earlier movies, yet those were the most remarkable ones for me. Jean Reno played the heartless father here, he caused the death of his son. His way of playing the role of his character was mediocre and occasionally it set out several instabilities.It wouldn't even have surprised me when Reno began crying whilst holding his son's corpse, who got killed trying to save his life. The main reason for that is because there was not a sign of concord between Jean Reno and Gaspard Ulliel. It wouldn't be wrong to compare Ulliel and Reno here, since it's very clear to eye that Reno gave one of his worst performances while Ulliel giving his best. Yet, even after this comparison, even Reno played his worst performance while Ulliel played his best; still Reno acted better. So, if you are watching Le Premier Cercle for one of these stars you won't like the movie. Oppositely, if you liked the movie you won't like the performances of the stars here.Le Premier Cercle continues the endless tales of immigrant crime stories that Jean-Christophe Grangé brought to mind. A family escapes from the Armenian holocaust during the World War-I in Turkey. By time the family get involved in the illegal trade of sensitive items and weapons with overseas. When history leaves its heritage to the power of the underworld empire in our present time, we know that no matter what thriller story is created the result is always same: Whoever has the power and the authority wins the lawsuit.Almost one third of this film is dealing with the common rat race between the police and the mafia. The next one third slice is crime and action which is not offering anything special or new. Finally the last one third section(apart from the erotic and dramatic segments) is a must-see suspense. Accordingly those segments come to vision very purely that editing is so simplemindedly offering us an easy-to-watch popcorn flick.The actual wonderingly awaited scenes ,which are mixed brilliantly with suspense and high tension, start when you feel that the story has begun to create a new and unexpected story. Plot has been installed with a high potential, such that when the story begins to expand; it becomes like a puzzle with "How?" and "Why?" questions coming to mind, which are getting their answers at the end. It's a film that heroes and stars die, villains live. When the moment comes shocking incidents begin to occur and from now on it's hard to guess what happens next. I strongly advise Le Premier Cercle to anybody who likes surprise suspenses.