| Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation | Release Date: October 7, 1971 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
17
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Surely one of the most exciting -- and brutal -- movies ever made...This is slam-bang, suspenseful, sardonically funny, furious-paced melodrama culminating in the justly famous chase sequence. [21 July 1985, p.5]
The chase influenced a generation of filmmakers, and Hackman's Popeye Doyle put an indelible stamp on the archetypal burned-out cop who was to become such a ubiquitous presence in movies. [12 March 1999, p.16]
I'd seen moments from that chase for years, held up as an example of what makes the film great. And it is a great sequence. But it's even better in context, arriving after many scenes of false starts, wrong turns, and frustrating dead ends, like a brilliantly staged cat-and-mouse game on the subway involving Doyle and Fernando Rey's smooth French gangster. The explosions have even more impact when you first get to see the fuses slowly burning down...It's also what most imitators don't get. You can put together the most exciting sequence ever filmed, and it won't matter—or at least won't matter beyond the seconds it takes to unfold—if the material around it isn't there.
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The French Connection is a knockout police thriller with so much jarring excitement that it almost calls for comic-book expletives. POW!, ZOWIE! The film has all the depth of a mud puddle, but Director William Friedkin (The Night They Raided Minsky's) sets such a frantic pace that there is hardly a chance to notice, much less care.
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A hugely successful slam-bang thriller that zaps the audience with noise, speed, and brutality. It's certainly exciting, bu that excitement isn't necessarily a pleasure. The ominous music keeps tightening the screws and heating things up; the movie is like an aggravated case of New York.
The real problems, however, are that Friedkin's nervy, noisy, undisciplined pseudo-realism sits uneasily with his suspense-motivated shock editing; and that compared to (say) Siegel's Dirty Harry, the film maintains no critical distance from (indeed, rather relishes) its 'loveable' hero's brutal vigilante psychology.
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