Movie 51: Un Prophete

That’s A Prophet, but in French!

A young Arabic man, Malik, is sent to prison for an unknown crime but he gets six years. Don’t think he’s meant to be much more than a petty criminal though. Prison is tough when your on your own and he ends up whacking a guy to get in with the Corsican’s that run the joint. And slowly works his way up.

That’s less spoilery than every other description I saw.

Part of the idea behind prison is that you supposed to improve yourself so you’ll do well when you get out. By this they mean learning to write, get a degree, some skills, whatever. Invariably people learn to be better criminals. And that’s basically what Malik does. He’s smart and listens, so he learns.

This wasn’t as harrowing as I expected, though there’s a few tough scenes. I also expected a whole crap load of muslim stuff from the title but there isn’t any. The title could refer to two things in my opinion, the second is probably more likely. The first is that Malik literally makes a profit so they may have taken that and spinned it a little bit. Which is actually quite clever, but not likely.

The second is that Malik see’s the guy that he killed for quite a while in his head, and that guy is able to tell him some things before they happen. Unfortunately this is a very minor part of the plot. So minor in fact that it seems it could have been chucked without effecting the movie in any major way. It seems frivolous to me. Why have this supernatural element if it isn’t a bigger part, if it isn’t the main reason that Malik gets somewhere? Because it isn’t. It helps him a little but he did fine without it.

Besides that complaint, and the fact that its not as harsh as it could have been, this is a damned fine prison movie. The plot is organic and it doesn’t feel like your watching for as long as you are. The performances are all good, though nothing particularly blew my socks off. It was certainly a refresher amongst the other drek I’ve watched that’s been nominated for a foreign film Oscar.

Not the most in depth review but with 30 minutes of the film left I had to piss about with the most frustrating laptop in the world and try to get it back on the net (not my computer btw). So I was in a bad mood and lost the thread of the film a bit. OH and it ends with the worst version of Mack the Knife I’ve ever heard. I love that song, so baaaaad French people *smack*

Next up: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen