I watched Olivier Marchal's Department 36 and Tell No One a few years ago, and this movie clinches it. Watching Marchal's movies is like eating a soufflé' - pretty to look at, full of volume but devoid of substance. Being a former cop, he explores the sinister underbelly of police corruption and complacency as he did in Department 36, with the jaded anti-hero battling to survive despite the odds. But Auteil's character goes about his work with such incompetency as shown in his arrest of the serial killer that it's difficult to find any empathy for him, and you think his superiors have a point in treating him like the loser he is. The plot is a mishmash of themes poorly explored and laced with so many inconsistencies made even worse by the film's pretentious grandeur.

This one's just as bad as the director's previous movie.Full of fake gravitas, hollow posturing, stupid behaviour, self-important bleak pseudo-philosophizing, contrived storytelling and unbelievable character development. Not to mention the many piled-up clichés.A policeman's life may be hell on earth, but this pic offers just superficial and wound-up theatrics without any feeling for real-life matters of detection and police work, let alone sincere emotions.And as an entertaining psycho-thriller "Seven" style it doesn't work either.3 out of 10 dead owner's pets

I was really thrilled by "36 Quai Des Orfèvres" (aka Department 36) ... for once you could feel a real policeman tale by an ex-cop. I am slightly disgusted by MR 73. I agree with the first comments I read on IMDb. The film is bleak, spooky, desperate and after the introductory minutes no one wants to laugh anymore. What's more, the ideology under the images is debatable to say the least. Criminals stay criminals whatever the amount of redeeming they show off.If they're given a conditional release after 20 years of prison, kill them before they can commit a new murder ! Good cops stay good cops, whatever the amount of drinking and "petty demeanors" such as high-jacking a bus for example they can be responsible of. Auteuil plays an ex-good cop: he drinks like a fish, high-jacks a bus to get back home with his policeman gun and is retrograded as a heavy sentence to another service of Marseille's police ! he steals crucial evidences, acts as the local Zorro with a fellow policeman who finds death in the process in company of the serial killer ... and he's given the retirement sack (with 70 % of wages)...only because the criminal himself (credibility rebuke)happens to be the son of a high rank officer of the Police. In what Republic are we supposed to live ? This film is certainly not a defense and illustration of the glorious french police corp, rather the contrary. I give a 7 though, for the quality of filming and interpretation.

Do not go for seeing it if you're in the mood to commit suicide; there would be some work for the undertaker...This movie would give neurasthenia to a young couple on his weeding day.The tale of an alcoholic cop whose broken life has led him on the road to perdition. A cop whose the wife is nearly a zombie. A cop with no more friends, except one. A cop who is determined to neutralize, at all cost, a serial killer.A cop who has nothing more to lose.Olivier Marchall - ex cop - gives here a masterpiece. Daniel Auteuil is outstanding in the leading character.It's an awful, terrific story, a nightmarish odyssey for a man on the way to hell. It reminds me the Hughes Pagan's novels. Pagan is an ex cop himself and a friend of Olivier Marchall.MR 73 torn me to pieces. I couldn't move a muscle after seeing it.