Very Cool!!!

To me, this movie is perfection.

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

In 1999, ultra-violence was the opportunity for Jan Kounen, a mediocre French director, to create some hype around his first full-length movie.Dobermann (young Vincent Cassel) is a gangster with his team of crazy violent sidekicks. He is engaging in a new series of bank robbery, but he has to confront with a brigade of tuff policemen. One of these cops (Tchéky Karyo) has fascist methods, using torture as an investigation mean.The cinematography is hideous : the color balance is outrageous, and the wardrobe and hairdresser director should be fired. Kounen wants to prove his mastery of cinematography, and the film is a mixbag of every idea he has stolen from the classics : split-screen, slow-motion, stroboscopic effects, muted audio track, wide angle camera, Hitchcock's dolly zoom. But the final mix is like a cocktail of chocolate, vodka and ketchup : you just want to vomit.Unfortunately, the film is totally wasted. The characters are so stupid you don't know if you should laugh at them, or at the pretentious director who created them. Dobermann himself is supposed to be impressive, but he has no impact on script, close to being transparent.Jan Kounen might have wanted to create a kind of pamphlet about police and how cops can sometimes act worse than criminals... but Doberman is more like the non-sense of a 7-year-old kid who has smoke weed.

Well, this is different: a super-charged, super-violent French crime thriller that starts off with an imaginatively devised shot of the profile of a dog looking at the sky mirrored by the spire of the church he is sitting outside, and proceeds to go off on a truly bizarre journey, the detail of which admirably disguises the essentially routine storyline.Vincent Cassel plays Doberman, a career criminal, who leads a weird band of villains and has a deaf girlfriend. He invests the role with a suitable coolness that acts as a counterpoint to the manic behaviour of both his team and the psychopathically sadistic police officer determined to catch him after he slips through the police's hands during a hold-up, then makes fools of them all by nipping back to collect a couple of accomplices he left behind. Making good their escape necessitates the gang wedging a live grenade in the helmet of a pursuing motorbike cop in pursuit.It would be easy to write this off as some kind of quasi Tarantino-wannabe with a comic slant (and there are some sublimely funny moments) but Doberman is much better than that. Doberman takes the basic premise of early Tarantino and gives it a perversely comic twist that somehow hits more often than it misses. The director throws every trick he knows at the screen and, for the most part (apart from an irritating split-screen sequence) he does well. As long as you're not in the mood for something mellow you should be entertained by the endlessly inventive ways in which the tale unfolds.

Dobermann from 1997 is a quite destructive movie, which to mewas kind of a drag to watch at times, but still fascinating.Lots of the humour that I think the movie aimed to have kind ofdrowned in its pretty dark, violent and almost depressiveatmosphere. Vincent Cassell was good in this, and fans of the gorgeousMonica Belluci probably won't be disappointed either. It quite reminded me of Gaspar Nóe's "Irreversible". Dark andawful, but more diguised as a cartoonhero movie. Just thatDobermann had no actual superpowers. I know the movie wasn't aired here in Norway due to its graphicnature, and I can understand that. Try it if you like French cinema and just can't get enough ofTarantino.

This should be a fantastically amoral feast of over-hyped violent excess. There should be brutally hip carnage splayed from one end to the next, taking in the seediest plot imaginable, delivering amoral thrills to crack a viewer's teeth wide open. Let's face facts; This was never meant to be a movie about Nice, Kind people. Those folk, although fully deserving of their place in moral movies, just can't satisfy certain filmgoing needs. Give me pain, suffering and brutality! Not, as Jan Kounan gives us, flat characters, a non-existent plot, pointless, annoying camera movements and a soundtrack that in no way compliments the on screen behaviour. It isn't even properly violent, just dull. Watch "Ichi The Killer" instead.