The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Nice colorful remake of the black-and-white 1966 version in the tradition of the Nouveau Vague policiers! The film fully reflects the French tradition of showing honorable, almost hero-like gangsters. No emphasis on big explosions but emphasis on the characters. And of course, if you want to meet a gangster in France, a French director will not let you down and take you to Marseille.About the story: A older 'respected' gangster is freed from prison and returns to his love, only to find that her business (sigaret smuggling under the cover of a night club) has just been under attack of a untrustworthy villain. This marks the change of the gangster landscape where the old gangster has no future. On his way to freedom in Italy he passes the port of Marseille where he is invited by a honorable gangster to perform in one more heist for another honorable gangster. But of course: before escaping to Italy he is spotted and captured by the police. After been set up by the police and haunted by other villains, there is only one way out: clear his honorable name by ultimate sacrifice. Curious about the role of his mistress? Please go see this film.

The gangster genre under Melville was always a little philosophical, a little Sartrean, as it examined the motives of men in the world of crime. It added an extra chic to an otherwise American style of story telling set amongst alleys and bars and clouds of cigarette smoke.That style can also lead into pretentiousness, as though the thinness of the story and the genre form of the characters can be raised to higher art if it is treated as long drama. But to do that, deeper themes need exploring, the capacity to be a writer, a filmmaker, of real effect is required and that is not possible in the strict genre of gangster movies.Unfortunately what is on offer here is simple but overly long. It's pompous. It seems as if there might be something more to it but there isn't. The story has been seen many times before and this treatment at two and half hours could be cut by 40 minutes without any loss. The extra tracking shots; the shots with the cars all leaving a street in real time could be cut because we know what happens, the cars go to another place. Easy. The windy long dialog, which is not very engaging could be shortened and made tougher just like gangster pictures were once made. These are men talk in stabs and gunshots.But of greater weakness is the entire ensemble cast and especially Auteuil who should never have been chosen, he brings too many other roles to this and he lacks the beady eyed killer instinct. Bellucci is not very involved but for her Brigitte Bardot hairstyle and Dutronc does what Dutronc often does. Consequently the hats take over as every male has one and the lighting is all yellow and green filter throughout perhaps to represent the past so the overall effect is like an adults comic book, or some other pastiche of the genre because the story may be too tired and unable to be delivered straight. The feeling when it's over and done is also faintly philosophical: two and half hours have passed and you are older but perhaps no wiser for losing the time.

Good plot with great actors, but they seem to act like beginners! This movie is a bad copy of Michel Audiard style dialogs, no where near as funny. The actors seem board stiff. Did they need cash that bad?! I haven't seen the original movie with Lino Ventura, but I'm keen on watching it to be able to compare. The picture is fuzzy and the sound bad (I didn't understand all the dialogs), but perhaps this was due to the cinema, which is a local one (250 seats, one film at a time, but really cheap entry!). This movie is just not worth it.

Based on the novel Un Reglement de Comptes by Jose Giovanni on which legendary auteur Jean-Pierre Melville based his classic 1966 film, one has to admire the balls on Alain Corneau for tackling the same source material. A more colorful adaptation of the Giovanni novel, SECOND BREATH rejects all things black and white. Headlamps are amber and there's even a jaundiced light over black and white crime scene photos. In fact, Corneau's SECOND BREATH isn't just colorful; it's garish. Hues are saturated to stratospheric levels.Apart from the color and some intensified violence, Corneau's version of SECOND BREATH is an exercise in redundancy for fans of the original Melville film. It's not to say that Corneau's film is bad by any stretch of the imagination. It's simply just not necessary.