Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Touches You

Such a frustrating disappointment

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

A Crime is a thriller starring Norman Reedus, Emmanuelle Béart and Harvey Keitel.The screenplay is about the devastated life of a man haunted by the unsolved murder of his beloved wife and is strangely complicated by the mysterious neighbor who loves him from afar.The film was directed by Manuel Pradal.Vincent's (Reedus) wife has suffered a most brutal fate, and these days the once happy New Yorker is but a frozen shell of his former self.He is not a man unloved, however, because although he may currently be unaware of her feelings for him, his neighbor Alice (Béart) knows in her heart that she and Vincent were meant to be together. All that needs to happen to make Vincent recognize her love is for the grieving widower to finally be liberated from his tragic past; and she is willing to go to any lengths necessary in order to make this happen. If he was finally to find the man responsible for his wife's death, he could finally be free to open his heart to her.When she hails a cab driven by lonely New York soul,Roger (Keitel), the gears of the scheming woman's elaborate plan are slowly set into motion despite the ignorance of both the naive cab driver, and the somber object of her delusional affections. The performance of the cast particularly Harvey Keitel save this pointless movie and poorly written screenplay.But still,it never fails to entertain and provide some unusual twists that makes it a decent thriller.In the end,you probably neither care about the events,the twists nor the characters in the movie.

***SPOILERS***SPOILERS***SPOILERS**** I watched this movie because I'm a big Norman Reedus fan. I would have preferred if he'd had more screen time for character development. My review contains SPOILERS! Alice (Emmanuelle Beart), a small woman with lips like a cartoon duck, is supposedly so beautiful she can get any man she wants. Predictably, she wants the one man who doesn't want her: Vincent (Reedus), who finds her annoying. He's also hung up on his wife's murder of 3 years prior, which he believes was committed by a cabbie in a yellow cab with a dented door, and wearing a red shirt and a ring. Now, you'd think they'd be able to find this guy. Granted, there are tons of cabs in NYC, but not all of them are yellow. You think they'd be able to find cabs that were on the road at that time and check for dented doors, and also check dispatch records to see which cabbies were driving. But no, with all the information they have, they can't find the killer.Alice decides that if Vincent can only get over his wife's murder (by killing the killer), he would immediately and automagically fall in love with her, despite the fact that he doesn't really like her. She then dupes aging cabbie Roger (Harvey Keitel) to think that the most beautiful woman in the world could fall instantly in love with an aging cabbie who has a boomerang fetish. She dents his cab door (no explanation how she could duplicate the size, shape & location of a dent she's never seen), buys him a red shirt (as if the cabbie wouldn't have changed his shirt in 3 years) and a ring, which again we don't know how she could duplicate.She steers Roger toward Vincent, who arranges Roger's death but does such a bad job of it (despite being helped by a gang) that Roger lives, seeks out Alice (returns to her like a BOOMERANG, get it?) and after Alice tearfully confesses everything to him, decides he still wants her. After doing a weird dance with a booze glass at a jazz club, he insists that he and Alice leave NYC. The minute he falls asleep in her presence, she murders him. Since the NYC police are portrayed as completely incompetent, we are left with the idea she gets away with it and she, Vincent, and his dog all live happily ever after, because of course the need to avenge his wife really was all that was needed for Vincent to fall madly in love with Alice.I liked the look of this film, and I did keep wondering what would happen next. The acting is decent but Reedus is only given a one-dimensional character to play, and the numerous implausibilities hampered it for me. I generously give it a 7, because it gave me a couple of hours to look (on and off) at Norman Reedus.

Although this was an intriguing film and Mr. Keitel is always a pleasure to watch, the screenplay left me disappointed. In the first place, all the husband did was glimpse a taxi passing him in the opposite direction and from that deduced that the taxi driver killed his wife. No motive, no explanation. We just see her dead body and leap ahead three years to see the man obsessed with his wife's murder. For no reason that I can ascertain, even the cops take it for granted that the taxi driver was the culprit; all this based upon one brief glance of a speeding taxi. We (the viewers) didn't even get a good look, but the husband managed to note a long gash in the driver's door, a large ring on the driver's hand and a red jacket the driver was wearing. Now we're expected to believe that three years later the murderer is still driving around in his taxi with his red jacket and big ring. In the end, a broke and homeless taxi driver and a broke woman suddenly have a nice vehicle to drive and in it she finds a large ring which presumably tells us that after all, this man is actually the taxi driver who murdered a woman three years earlier. If I were a cop, she and the writer are the only culprits I'd throw in jail.

Some people might have two problems with the film: 1. It's rather old fashioned (which is a good thing in my opinion, I don't like the regular hyped mainstream trash). The plot is the kind of story that could come from a novel of Patricia Highsmith, and the look of the film is more like it's from the late 70's or early 80's. 2. The pretty complex story with a lot of strange (and maybe) almost unbelievable coincidences. And you don't get a simple positive character for identification. Exact the same way many french thrillers from the good old times were working (especially those of Clouzot). Though sometimes these films seem a bit too over-constructed (and I must admit I had this problem when I first saw Clouzot's "Les Diaboliques", 1955). But when you accept this (and life itself sometimes surprises us with strange coincidences too), you will see an excellent, very emotional thriller with great performances. You'll never know what happens next!