Maurice G. Dantec

(On Cable TV, October 2022) I suspect that few people these days go “Oh, there’s La Sirène rouge! I’ve got to watch that!” but completionism is a strange disease, and there were enough fascinating oddities in the film’s creative credits to intrigue me. The biggest one was seeing that it’s an early effort from writer-director Olivier Megaton, who went on, a few years later, to make a modest splash in the Hollywood B-movie action scene by directing four mildly-received thrillers from the Luc Besson Eurocorp movie factory. (Of those four, only Colombiana was okay—The Transporter 3, Taken 2 and Taken 3 were all various shades of disappointing)  Megaton’s filmography has been sparse since 2014’s much-excoriated Taken 3, so it’s safe to presume he’s now in the mythical director jail. But what about his pre-Hollywood movies, the ones that presumably were the calling card that had Besson knocking at his door to direct? Could it be a case of “I liked his earlier, less-Hollywood stuff better”? Well, no: it turns out that La sirène rouge is of a piece with his later Eurocorp films: preoccupied by visual cool, but lacking in the narrative and coherency departments. He’s not much of an actor’s director either—the now-disgraced Asia Argento shows up here as a dogged police officer chasing after the daughter of a powerful mob madam, but her limitations are obvious. The script has a few surprises for Science Fiction fans in that even it’s co-written by Megaton, two other writers and expatriate American SF legend Norman Spinrad (what?!?), based on the debut novel from controversial writer Maurice G. Dantec, since then deceased. (This makes more sense when you find out that Dantec and Spinrad once played in a band together.)  Alas, that’s probably the most interesting thing about a by-the-numbers story that blends clichés without quite managing to turn them into something compelling. Some of the execution is better than the material, but not by much—the film feels instantly dated to the early 2000s through its overprocessed colour grading and some musical choices, but the sense of lassitude that comes from the dull action sequences and showy (but useless) directorial flourishes is timeless. A few good moments hint at a much better film if Megaton could just calm down and care about continuity… but the rest of La sirène rouge blares for itself as a disappointment. So yes—this is where Megaton’s pre-Hollywood creds come from, and no: he’s not some kind of misunderstood auteur.