Versus (I) (2019) User Reviews

A pathetic thriller

[FrenchEddieFelson · 3/10 · 10 May 2019]

An artificial and tasteless conflict between young offenders and petty bourgeois, clumsily imitating the atmospheres of Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983), but without the same talent undoubtedly. Everything is stereotyped and predictable, except the ending which is an excretion of madness and gratuitous violence.

Not to mention the deep and refined dialogues, vaguely inspired by a comedy from Molière, as the following scene elegantly suggests. Gabriel: 'Did you see me smashing theirs faces?' Achille: 'No, I was busy getting sucked'. Then, Gabriel begins to pee in the swimming pool. Finally, Achille pushes Gabriel in the pool.

Despite a relatively neat photography and an obvious sense of aesthetics, I guess this movie is a teen challenge to appear in the Bottom 100 of IMDb. Nice try!

How to ruin an interesting promise.

[johannes2000-1 · 4/10 · 17 September 2021]

Young Achille is severely beaten-up by a group of unknown street kids in the subway, and after that travels to the country house of his well-to-do family aunt to recuperate. It's clear by his taciturn, almost frozen behavior that he's severely traumatized, and in the first half hour of the movie I was intrigued where this would lead to, especially when he's confronted with Brian, an aggressive local thug, who clearly triggers his fears and anxieties.

Now I would have understood it, if he considered this obnoxious and dangerous guy as some sort of incarnation or substitute of the ones that maltreated him, and that his troubled mind would make him impose on Brian some sort of revenge "by-proxy". But here the writers and director took a mind-boggling U-turn, by out-of the blue turning Achille into a relentless mass murderer on the loose, walking through the dark neighborhood like a crazed zombie, killing everyone he stumbles upon, to at last get to his adversary.

We don't get any explanation why he kills all these friends and family-members, so the only motivation seems to be that he just snapped completely out-of his mind. Rather easy for the writers, I would say. The last scene of the movie points at a cynical conclusion, but we'll never know for real, because they cut the story short right then and there.

Maybe the attractive photography deserves some praise, and the guy that played Achille at least was nice to look at, but for the rest I was pretty disappointed, they turned an in itself interesting premise into this lame dime-a-dozen B-film.

High goals/society

[kosmasp · 5/10 · 19 September 2021]

The movie sets out to make complicated things work. Youth and their ... struggles. Rich vs poor kids of sorts ... but not as simple as that. And yes if you compare this to Scorsese or Coppola - their early efforts mostly - this movie will not come up as a winner ... quite the opposite.

Still if you like your dramas to be different you may find some interesting ideas and certainly some interesting performances. Morally there are many things to explore, even when and while they may be confusing. Not great, but not the worst I've seen by a stretch.

Berserk

[searchanddestroy-1 · 9/10 · 15 May 2019]

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER I love this ankwar film, sometimes lousy in directing. I loved it, despite of this because you have here no good character vs evil one scheme,at least not as you may expect it to be. The petty bourgeois from the beginning, whom you can feel empathy for, becomes in the end some kind of evil one. And the rebel without a cause punk, by the scarface becomes nearly the good guy of the story. I loved the face to face between the two of them. OK, I repeat, that's pretty clumsy, not tht well acted, played, who I don't care at all. I love unusal schemes.