There were only a few films I saw at the Cannes Film Festival that I couldn’t muster the interest or the time to review, one of those was Rachid Bouchareb’s Outside the Law (Hors La Loi), a sequel to Bouchareb’s excellent 2006 Oscar-nominated feature Days of Glory. Outside the Law has been picked up by the Cohen Media Group for a November 3 release and is Algeria’s submission as one of the 65 films up for consideration in the Foreign Language Film category for the 83rd Academy Awards. Personally, I don’t think it stands a chance.
Days of Glory centered on soldiers from France’s North African colonies who helped liberate Gaul from the Nazis during WWII, and Outside the Law moves the story forward to the Algerian battles in Paris for independence from France. The film features the same three actors from the first film — Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila — although they are completely different characters.
The trio plays brothers who’ve lost their home in Algeria and are left to do what they can to survive. One joins the French army, another becomes a leader of the Algerian independence movement and the other sets off to make money promoting underground boxing and running a nightclub. The pieces are there for a good film, but this thing just goes through the motions to the point it ends up a big bore.
The action is an afterthought and the performances were sadly disappointing considering how great all three of the leads were in Days of Glory. However, I don’t necessarily blame that on Debbouze, Zem and Bouajila as much as I target Bouchareb’s screenplay. The characters seemed like nothing more than weak copies of far more interesting cinematic characters that came before them who were caught in similar predicaments. There’s hardly enough intrigue here to allow for that. One character focuses on his morals, another on a sense of what is right and another on a sense of putting oneself first, which pretty much guarantees where the story is going to go as certain situations present themselves.
Today the trailer arrived online over at Apple and I have encoded a version of it directly below. Fair warning is to say this paints a relatively unrecognizable picture of the actual movie itself.
However, I think I have said enough. Have a look for yourself.
