Movie Details
Lost Bullet 2: Back for More (2022)
Director: Guillaume Pierret
Cast: Alban Lenoir, Stéfi Celma, and Sébastien Lalanne
Movie Type: Action/Thriller
Release date: 11 November 2022
IMDB Rating: 6.3/10
Language: French
Duration: 1h 38m
Trailer
Synopsis
I hesitated for a while, as to why we don’t have a review on MZ of the very successful number one Lost Bullet before I realized that Hlad and I “dated” it only in MZ Live. And that meltdown is more about a small, inconspicuous B-series, which they baked in France from popular ingredients, and then inconspicuously dropped on Netflix. Lino, a perpetually gloomy car mechanic, whom the police chief pulls out of the dungeon and gives him a second chance, only to be sent to the other world by rotten colleagues from his unit who try to throw it at Lino. A simple plot of one with a clear goal to avenge his mentor and get out of trouble with the help of a shot from Renault 21 and his fists.
The Lost Bullet was an unexpected hit and a solid piece of craft that I would not hesitate to recommend to anyone, although even with all the joy I get from B’s like this, I couldn’t give it more than a humble seven. Lino is not exactly full of charisma and he does not sprinkle a lot of slogans and character-building speeches through his beard. In this, it resembles a video game character in which the player puts himself. There are more parallels because even though Lino is constantly getting the lens, he always gets back up and smashes everyone to pieces like Rocky. And you’ll be entertained by that, as well as unexpectedly brutal fatalities and an old French sedan equipped with hooks that split nearby cars like cans of sardines.
Number two starts ten minutes after number one and somewhat resets the entire progression. Kind of like when you die in that video game and have to start over. Fortunately, Lino has leveled at least in terms of the car, the good old Renault has a new paint job and hooks that go into electricity, so apart from tearing apart, cars can be thrown ten meters into the air like in Transformers. It looks great in the demos, but in the movie, the attraction only takes about a minute like this. The whole Lost Bullet 2 feels like the second episode of the first season of a great series. Someone compares it to Kobra 11 and it wouldn’t be far from the truth, because the tangled plot here really evokes TV procedurals, which sometimes fill the footage unnecessarily. Lino goes about his business, he can beat up an entire police unit, and beat up a whole regiment of chase cars, but it all feels the same,
There is a lack of clearly defined villains and Lino lacks drive, which undoubtedly hurts all the solid craft around him. Are there any good battles? Yes. Great chases? Certainly! Even those fatalities occur again and the footage is pleasant (one hundred minutes). But the whole thing is suspiciously sloppy – where a bromance could be looming, everything is played out. The majestic-looking special forces cop with whom Lino could have a boss fight is just another piece of meat, and the charismatic cop gets more space in the end, but it still gives the impression that the screenwriters don’t know what to do with her.
Quite possibly, someone hastily wrote on the paper “Here will be a fight in an apartment, there will be a battle at the station, there will be a chase through Paris, and here we will put a chase on a farm”. The film is nothing more than a bunch of very successful action scenes, connected by a very unconvincing detective story. Of course, we know that Lino will get his way, so we don’t pay attention to all the empty dialogue and useless conspiracy theories, but to the suppression of logic from here to there, ladies and gentlemen. Plus, it’s still too early for The Lost Bullet to turn into France’s Fast and Furious, where the laws of physics and others are thrown into a tailspin. What was a likable gritty detective story in the first one, simple but straightforward, degenerated in the second volume into a mere tramp and waste of money.
Perhaps the trio will correct this hesitation. The number two is not a waste of time, but it seems rushed and a bit unnecessary. Not that it might have any excessively big competition, which is why I nod at it in peace and calmly pass it on to old-timers who remember the era of the 90s action movies with tears in their eyes. It is a fact that most of the French and co-production blockbusters (Taken The Courier) failed to follow the magic of the original in twos, but here it is more about the fact that the same crew suddenly received a briefcase full of money without having an idea for a sequel. And so he simply filmed “more of the same” in a genre that would have gone unnoticed a few decades ago. Today we probably want a little more. But that doesn’t mean we stop hoping. Don’t let that rating fool you, I’m quite looking forward to the triple because at worst it will be “the same” again.
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