Omar Sy

  • The Call of the Wild (2020)

    The Call of the Wild (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I did not expect an adaptation of Jack London’s classic novel of Gold Rush adventure to pack in so much CGI, but once you commit to full CGI in order to get pixel-perfect performances out of your animal characters, you might as well commit to what’s nearly a fully animated film. Not even heading over to the Yukon for location shooting, The Call of the Wild updates London’s story to include pulse-pounding special effects showcases, a dog that looks completely generated by computer, and a script tuned to modern sensibilities. It does sound awful to say that the dogs don’t feel real, and that’s true—but it would be selling the movie short to stop at that, because what you do gain from this trickery is a movie that moves quickly and has precise control over its visuals. Directed by animation film veteran Chris Sanders, the film does find its best moments in very real and human performances: Harrison Ford as a hermit that comes to care again about the world through his dog, but also Omar Sy as a French-Canadian postal worker and a welcome appearance by the striking Care Gee. Still, it’s an adventure story, and an episodic one at that—the overall dramatic arc is for the dog protagonist to free himself from humans, and that’s the point of it. I probably would care a bit more if I was a dog person, but even as it is, I had a good-enough time with The Call of the Wild. It’s far from a perfect film and it does struggle in trying to define its audience, but it moves quickly at times, and can be worth a look if only for the not-quite-perfect visual effects.

  • Intouchables [The Intouchables] (2011)

    Intouchables [The Intouchables] (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2014)  Some movies seem to come out of nowhere even when you’re paying attention, and so I recently realized that I hadn’t seen Intouchables even though it had received an astonishing number of box-office admissions, reviews, awards and popular votes on IMDB.  Of course, North-America viewers may be excused: The film wasn’t widely released in the US, but was a striking success elsewhere in the world (including in its native France, when it raked up more than 19 million tickets sold) and if you check the details of its high IMDB ranking, you can see the difference.  You will ask, of course, whether the film deserves this overseas success, and the answer will be comforting: As a story about a paraplegic French aristocrat who hires a poor black man as his caretaker, Intouchables has almost all of the checklist items for heartwarming Oscar-bait movies: Physical disability, class struggle, romance, triumph-of-the-human-spirit stuff, etc.  But Intouchables does more than the strict minimum, most remarkably allowing us early on to laugh along with the disabled character rather than being put off by his condition.  The first five minutes, remarkably enough, give us a nighttime car chase through Paris highways that results in a high-comedy sequence that sets the tone for the rest of the film.  Disability here isn’t to be pitied, and while most of the film revolves around the impoverished, borderline-criminal young man (Omar Sy, in a compelling performance) who becomes an aristocrat’s caretaker, the far more interesting character is the aristocrat (played by François Clouzet, incredibly likable) who voluntarily chooses to entrust his life to such an irreverent character.  It’s based on a true story, but loosely enough not to matter.  While the film does have a number of lengthy moments, a weak ending and some on-the-nose segments, it’s insidiously effective –by the time it’s over, it manages to follow a fairly rote formula in a way that’s lively and entertaining enough to be enjoyable.