The Red Siren (2002)Some films hit all the right notes. They contain a cast that play their parts to perfection. The story being told, you never want it to end. Everything jells so well. The Red Siren is not one of those films.The Red Siren plods along. Other than a rather good shootout scene, most of the time, I felt my interest drifting. Others here on IMDb have covered the story, so I will skip doing that, and cut to some facts.The good: Jean-Marc Barr, who plays Hugo an ex soldier, does a good job. The audio, fitted the mood most of the time. Camera work looks professional, even if some shots are unoriginal, for example, the classic looking down the centre of a spiral staircase.The bad: The Red Siren looks more like something from the late 80's and not 2002. Apparently the book on which the film is based is supposed to be good. Blame it on the script, the story failed grab my interest. There's an English actor with an English accent, he sounds and acts in an amateur way. There are a bunch of foreign actors, speaking English, and they sound wrong. Asia Argento, is far from on form, and manages to keep her kit on.

This bloody yet stylish European action thriller is well filmed and ambiguous enough to allow your imagination space for thought. Olivier Megaton direction is thoughtful and holds this interesting picture together. Jean-Marc Barr is good as the trained assassin who becomes the girl's protector. His acting inspires confidence and credibility to become Alice's (the girls) savior. Asia Argento who plays Anita a cynical Police Inspector who also needs to protect Alice. This seems to be at the core of this movie. Both Anita (Argento) and Hugo (Barr) need to protect this girl for personal reasons. Although the film does not elaborate on Anita's past you can sense her empathy seeing Alice as the girl within herself. Hugo on the other hand is a loner and has become jaded by his past experiences and through Alice he finds a reason to once again believe in his own goodness. - PCL

The book is good. Written by a French author living in Canada, it mixes the innocence of childhood with the atrocity of warfare. The first is personified by a young girl trying to escape the authority of her quite unrecommendable mother; the second by a mercenary who just came back from Bosnia, where he experienced killings and genocide. The story is about him finding back traces of innocence by helping her to escape, to survive, and therefore to grow up. It is full of complexity in the characters and of permanent tension in the plot. It is the basis for an excellent movie.Alas, ladies and gentlemen, here comes the first part of the spoiler: this isn't an adaptation from this book, or at least it goes so far from the book's purpose that it's unbearable. First, it is untruthful. Second, and more important, the freedom it takes towards the book doesn't make it better, on the contrary: the bad guys look strangely unprepared, the girl's mother isn't a powerful woman at all and looks completely unable to rationalize the gang she's supposed to lead.More important, the girl becomes almost a secondary character, when she was at the core of the plot in the book - along with her father, the only convincing character in the film. Jean-Marc Barr doesn't show what he's able to do, and most actors (especially Asia Argento) empoverish their characters by forgetting they are excellent actors. The multiplicity of languages isn't rendered. And the final scene where Hugo refuses to stay with Anita, symbolizing his complete comeback to innocence and childhood, is turned into a strange enrollment of the girl into the pro-weapons lobby...In short, this story deserves another film, with the same budget, the same technical crew (action scenes and visual effects are great, especially for a French movie!), and more or less the same actors. But a different choice should be made in what to keep from the book...

This is the kind of movie that allow me to say that French directors are able to make as good action movies as American ones. It's perhaps not so good as "Leon" or "Nikita" from Besson, but it's a new director : Megaton. The fact is that there are not as much electronics gadgets as in American movies, but we can see very nice pictures.