Olivier Megaton

  • La sirène rouge [The Red Siren] (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Taken 3 (2014)

    Taken 3 (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, November 2015) It may be time to sit down with Liam Neeson for an intervention.  For all of the money he must be making in doing these action thrillers at an age where most actors are trying to slow down, it’s not movies like Taken 3 that will make up his end-of-career highlights reel.  Duller and clunkier than most action thrillers, Taken 3 stays near Los Angeles in depicting a third family crisis for Neeson’s protagonist.  This time, though, the film dares to kill a returning character and the protagonist’s fury seems curiously tame compared to the first two films.  But then again, he’s being followed by criminals and the police.  Less xenophobic but far less interesting, Taken 3 struggles with the bare essentials of its genre: the action sequences are badly directed by Olivier Megaton, with choppy editing, incoherent sense of space and uncontrolled dramatic progression.  Taken 3 is lazy filmmaking at best, almost uninterested in its own story on the way to delivering another film in the series.  It doesn’t do much, wastes the dramatic potential of a death in the family and feels rote even at the best of times.  Neeson is far better than the material, and he’s the sole reason why this wasn’t a straight-to-video release.  What’s more damaging, though, is that he’s getting to be, well, a bit boring in these action roles.  Next to the underwhelming Run all Night and A Walk Among the Tombstones, we’re far from the dramatic heft of The Gray, or the bonkers action of Non-Stop or The A-Team.  I hope he starts picking better projects soon.

  • Colombiana (2011)

    Colombiana (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2012) If anyone in the world has earned the right to write yet another female assassin movie, it’s probably Luc Besson.  Besson’s not a particularly gifted screenwriter, but as a director he did help popularize the female-assassin stereotype in movies such as Nikita. Colombiana is another riff on a familiar concept: As a young girl’s parents are murdered by a drug lord, she vows revenge and dedicates her life to becoming a killing machine.  The story picks up years later as she nears her vengeance.  The rest is simply a series of kill-sequences noisily arranged by director Olivier Megaton, from a script by Besson and Robert Mark Kamen.  While some of their previous collaborations such as Transporter 3 were terrible even by B-movie standards, Colombiana is closer to Taken in understanding the mechanics of the action-thriller genre and delivering the formula in an energetic fashion.  It helps that Zoe Saldana has the lithe physique and feral intensity required by the role: Colombiana wouldn’t be as good without her intensely physical performance.  The cinematography, at least, is a bit more ambitious than usual and the result is a slick action movie.  It may not avoid a bit of stupidity around the edges, but it’s put together with some competence and doesn’t overstay its welcome once the overlong prologue is done.   Big guns, big explosions, original executions all point a little bit too much as set-piece-driven carnography, but fans of B-grade action movies will understand the game being played here.  The result is potable.