Most movies go out of their way to pander to audience expectations, but every now and then you see one that goes in the exact opposite direction. A case in point is "French Connection II," a perversely woebegone sequel to the classic academy award winner. The trumped-up plot is a non-starter. The script would have us believe that Popeye Doyle is being used as bait by the hostile French police without him knowing it. (We find this out rather early in the film, so I'm not giving too much away.) This makes no sense. I suspect Doyle wouldn't have minded at all if he had known, and the authorities might have gotten more cooperation out of him too. As it is, he remains a frustrated pain in the neck for them (and us) throughout much of the film. The pace sags noticeably while director John Frankenheimer indulges Gene Hackman in too many semi-improvised acting exercises. A grim and overlong sequence in which he is captured by the drug dealers, pumped up with heroin and then forced to go cold turkey does give the star a flashy drunken breakdown scene, but it stops the movie dead. We don't much care anyway because the character is even more consistently boorish and obnoxious here than he was in the first "Connection," even during the drug addition scenes, which were apparently designed to make him more vulnerable--an exercise in self-defeating futility. The excitement level finally picks up during the last half hour, but by then it's almost too late, and the final abrupt shot cheats the audience of any satisfaction it may get out of a moment for which it has been waiting the entire movie.
Review of French Connection II
