Action movie by French director Xavier Jeans “The Stranger”. Review

The action movie Farang directed by French director Xavier Jeans was released. Julia Shagelman he recalled hits featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Samir’s on-screen journey (2009 French junior kickboxing champion Nassim Si Ahmed) begins in the ring in the prison gym. For what he was imprisoned, the authors of the film do not specify, but now he has turned into an exemplary prisoner who listens to the wise instructions of a senior comrade who has seen a lot, reasonably avoids participating in intra-prison showdowns and calmly awaits his parole. It comes, and Samir, determined not to turn to the criminal path anymore, gets a job at a construction site, where he meets another bearer of folk philosophy, who informs him that it is not a person who chooses his own destiny, but Allah predetermines it. Meanwhile, the dark past does not leave our hero alone: ​​the drug dealer, for whom he used to work, wants him to take up the old again, and when he refuses, he sends his henchmen after him, one of whom Samir ends up accidentally killing.

Having omitted quite a few details about how he got out of this situation, Xavier Jeans and his three co-writers of the script move the action forward five years. Samir now lives in Thailand under the name Sam, along with his beautiful pregnant wife Mia (Lauryn Noone) and her daughter from her first marriage, Dara (Chananticha Than-kwa), whom she loves like her own. Mia works in a bar, Sam takes tourists to and from the airport, and also participates in Thai boxing matches for money. And if in some of these fights he has to lose by agreement, then this is still a small and almost innocent fraud compared to what he did before.

A happy little family saves up money to buy a plot by the sea and build their own karaoke bar there. However, looking at how they serenely frolic in the waves and discussing plans for the future, any viewer who has seen two or three action films in his life understands that Miya and her unborn baby, alas, are not residents, otherwise we would have watched completely different movie. That’s how it comes out.

The couple is denied the purchase of land – their price was interrupted by a certain Narong (Olivier Gourmet), a French crime boss who has entrenched himself in Thailand. He agrees to cede the plot to Sam, but only if he does one small favor for him: using his pass, he will carry a suitcase with drugs to the airport. If Sam knew how to refuse such offers, he probably would not have gone to jail sometime, so he agrees, without really giving himself time to think about whether the bar and karaoke idea is worth a term in a Thai prison. Everything, of course, does not go according to plan: at the airport, Sam’s contact is arrested, the police rush to chase him, and when he runs home, Narong appears with his thugs. They kill Mia, kidnap Dara and set fire to the house, but Sam manages to survive. But now he has no choice but to look for his adopted daughter and take revenge on the bad guys.

“The Stranger”, filmed by the multi-stationer Zhans (among his works, in addition to action films, there are horror, and science fiction, and English-language series, and even comedy) in just three months, serves as clear evidence that in France, as in Russia, a generation of directors has grown stronger, who received their first film impressions from films such as “Double Impact”, “Kickboxer” and “Bloodsport”. Now they are making such films themselves, and in places these films are quite successfully mowed down to cult classics.

The sketchy plot in The Outsider only serves as a pretext for spectacular fights, and the crew really comes alive as Sam moves from mental anguish to brandishing legs, fists, knives, and swords. The final, most energetic third of the film features both a five-on-one elevator melee and a bloody hallway passage that was most likely inspired by Park Chang Wook’s Oldboy. Not without following the ideas of gender equality: armed and very dangerous women work in the gang of Narong on an equal basis with men, and Sam fights with them, respecting the equality of the sexes from all over.