Elsa the reporter (Diane Krueger) is in
Afghanistan investigating something or another. Heck if
I know what and to be honest with you it's not all that
important in the grand scheme of things. What is
important is that things are getting hot, it is Afghanistan
after all, and her sidekick Amen (Mehdi Nbhbou) has urged her,
implored her, begged her that it is time to go. Did Elsa
listen? Of course she didn't because if she did then we
wouldn't have a movie to watch, like we watched 'Forces
Speciales'… yeah we could've called it 'Special Forces' but we
like to be all authentic and stuff.
Elsa and Amen have been snatched by the completely evil
terrorist Zaief (Raz Degan) who I gotta admit looks more like
an International Male catalogue cover model than evil
terrorist, but there it is. And like most terrorist his
plan is to make his captors read some kind of crazy statement
then cut off their heads, the problem being that Elsa refuses
to read the statement and chose instant death instead.
Well Zaief can't do that… why I don't know… so he kills
somebody else. True enough that didn't make any sense to
me, but it also didn't make any sense to his religious leader
either who chastised my man for having a weakness for white
women.
The situation is a dire one for Elsa and she needs some
rescuing which introduces us to our super badass, hardass,
toughass French Special Forces unit who will be called into
action by the President himself to save this woman.
Initially the plan was for these six tough men just to do some
recon and provide intel until the cavalry came to take out
these hordes of Taliban bastards, but there's no time.
It's up to these six men, all by themselves to get this job
done.
Tagged with this impossible mission is tough
as nails Capt. Kovax (Djimon Hounsou), his number one Lucas
(Denis Menochet), Tic-Tac the jokester (Benoit Magimel),
Marius (Alain Alivon) who puts the Hard in Hardcore, Victor
(Alain Figlarz) who will shoot you as soon as shake your hand
and finally the newest edition to the team, baby faced
sharpshooter Elias (Raphael Personnaz). Are these men
happy about having to go head up against an enemy that
outnumbers them by what looks to be 75 to 1? No they are
not. Are they going to turn this job down?
Absolutely not.
The suicide mission begins, they save the girl, the enemy is
everywhere… and dumb as a bag of stupid rocks… but there are
so freaking many of them, not to mention the horrific terrain
they are dealing with so it's not looking good.
Regardless, our heroes have sworn to save this woman no matter
what… at least Kovax has, other members think this is dumb…
and not all of our heroic men are going to make it, but it was
kind of fun watching them try.
Director Stephane Rybojad's film 'Forces Speciales' is a
fairly simple movie. Heroic dudes on the run from stupid
terrorists, and believe me when I tell you that as far as
movie villains go, this group of terrorist were so dumb it was
almost comical. These cats made Boris and Natasha look
like Dr. Moriarty. I get that there's more of them than
there are heroes, but wave after wave after wave of terrorist
running out in the open to get mowed down by automatic gunfire
was kind of stupid. To be fair our heroes were also out
in the open a lot, in just as much peril as these stupid
terrorist, and realistically even by accident you would've
thought that at least a couple of heroes would've sucked down
a bullet or two during these insane open field bullet
barrages, but I guess our heroes are special forces so they
can shoot and also have a special forces force field
protecting them most of the time.
This bit of ridiculous nonsense shouldn't lead you into
thinking I didn't find 'Forces Speciales' entertaining, oh
good heavens no, I had a ball watching this movie and not the
least of these factors was how utterly ridiculous it
was. Strangely enough another thing I found
entertaining, which normally I wouldn't in an action movie,
was the overwrought, melodramatic ballet of violent death that
some our heroes were treated to. Clearly to keep things
somewhat fair not all of our soldiers are going to see Paris
again, at least not alive, so where the enemy was just
mindlessly mowed down, our heroes in peril were treated with
soaring strings, slow motion, heightened emotion and glorious
overacting from their colleagues when they fell. It was
kind of awesome. There was plenty of action, the action
was well executed if not somewhat silly in presentation and
the actors playing our tough soldiers, Djimon Hounsou in
particular, did a solid job of selling us the fact that they
were indeed badasses.
Diane Krueger doesn't get a lot of credit for being a decent
actress, possibly because she's pretty and being pretty and
talented is just patently unfair, and while I wasn't buying
her as a tough-as-nails reporter covering the middle east, she
did a fine job as a beleaguered damsel in distress on the
verge of complete collapse. Plus the woman has a command
of languages that is simply phenomenal. I guess her
native language is German, but she speaks a number of
languages and she speaks them all flawlessly which in itself
is an enviable gift.
'Forces Speciales' might not be the penultimate seek and
rescue war film, enemies that run out in front of bullets
repeatedly kind of prevent it from being that, but was an
entertaining one and this we cannot deny.
