I didn't find much about this movie I like. This is clearly style over substance. It draws it's inspiration from "Natural Born Killers" and "From Dusk till Dawn" much too clearly. The violent couple, the showdown in a hellish club, the over-the-top violence of course, the characters (gung-ho priest included? Check! The cop who's worse than Satan himself? Check!),... It wouldn't annoy me that much, if it weren't done so half-heartedly. The characters are so 1 dimensional it's not even funny anymore. I just couldn't give a damn about ANY of the characters on screen. Most notably: Inspector Christini, the "bad-ass cop". His behavior by the end of the movie is totally out of line and completely unbelievable. The acting is plain awful. It's meant to be cool, but ended up to be just silly and stupid. In one particularly cringe-worthy scene, one of the baddies watches some TV with scenes of a lion killing a zebra - horrendous overacting ensues. Dialogue? Umm... Let's just leave it at that, OK? To sum it up: Dobermann is pretty much a fashion victim of 90s film-making. It contains all the stereotype characters and clichés you'd expect from that era of film-making without adding anything original. And the worst part of it? It's absolutely predictable and therefore boring as heck. 2 eye-candy points for Monica Bellucci, 1 point for a very nasty fart joke, 1 point for effort and 1 because I would have loved it, if I was still 13.

Well, this is different: a super-charged, super-violent French crime thriller that starts off with an imaginatively devised shot of the profile of a dog looking at the sky mirrored by the spire of the church he is sitting outside, and proceeds to go off on a truly bizarre journey, the detail of which admirably disguises the essentially routine storyline.Vincent Cassel plays Doberman, a career criminal, who leads a weird band of villains and has a deaf girlfriend. He invests the role with a suitable coolness that acts as a counterpoint to the manic behaviour of both his team and the psychopathically sadistic police officer determined to catch him after he slips through the police's hands during a hold-up, then makes fools of them all by nipping back to collect a couple of accomplices he left behind. Making good their escape necessitates the gang wedging a live grenade in the helmet of a pursuing motorbike cop in pursuit.It would be easy to write this off as some kind of quasi Tarantino-wannabe with a comic slant (and there are some sublimely funny moments) but Doberman is much better than that. Doberman takes the basic premise of early Tarantino and gives it a perversely comic twist that somehow hits more often than it misses. The director throws every trick he knows at the screen and, for the most part (apart from an irritating split-screen sequence) he does well. As long as you're not in the mood for something mellow you should be entertained by the endlessly inventive ways in which the tale unfolds.

The movie looks like the project from film-school( in a good way) of a very talented student. You can immediately recognize the influences of Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Tarantino and Asian action cinema, as well as french action films(especially the french humor). The director uses pretty much every trick in the book, including CGI in the Dobermann sequence at the beginning of the movie and over-all seems not to be sure what technique to stick with. The action scenes, which are numerous are very well done but some in-between scenes and dialog are not very articulate, and a bit hard to follow. The movie is a loud(soundtrack includes The Prodigy), action-pumped and colorful account of a heist organized by bad-ass Dobermann(Vincent Cassel) and his girl Nat the gypsy(Monica Bellucci) with their gang, and the events that follow, when psychotic inspector Sauveur Cristini (Tchéky Karyo) picks up the chase. Vincent Cassel is brilliant as the violent criminal lead, in a Michael Madsen/Christopher Walken cross interpretation, as is Tchéky Karyo as the English one-liner dropping psychotic and violent cop, and Monica Bellucci is more violent and beautiful than ever playing a deaf-mute gypsy.Tough, rough, stylish and explicit.

Dobermann from 1997 is a quite destructive movie, which to mewas kind of a drag to watch at times, but still fascinating.Lots of the humour that I think the movie aimed to have kind ofdrowned in its pretty dark, violent and almost depressiveatmosphere. Vincent Cassell was good in this, and fans of the gorgeousMonica Belluci probably won't be disappointed either. It quite reminded me of Gaspar Nóe's "Irreversible". Dark andawful, but more diguised as a cartoonhero movie. Just thatDobermann had no actual superpowers. I know the movie wasn't aired here in Norway due to its graphicnature, and I can understand that. Try it if you like French cinema and just can't get enough ofTarantino.