The French Connection won five Academy Awards including best picture. Must not have been a very good year for movies. Because "best" is certainly not a word I would associate with this movie. This movie is slow, dull and full of contrivances that will insult your intelligence. Let's have our "hero" cops completely strip a car looking for drugs. Well, completely strip it except we'll leave just one part intact. Because after we've torn the whole car apart and found nothing the drugs couldn't possibly be hidden in that one remaining part could they? Sigh.
Anyhow, the threadbare plot here involves a couple of New York City narcotics cops investigating a shipment of drugs coming into the city from France. The movie immediately establishes who the bad guys are and exactly how their smuggling operation works so there's no mystery here. This is no whodunit. We know who the bad guys are, the cops know who the bad guys are and then...nothing. The bad guys drive around the city and the cops follow them. For an occasional change of pace the bad guys get out of their cars and walk around the city...and the cops follow them. Not a whole lot of anything going on here. Until THAT scene. The "greatest chase scene ever". Well, you call it greatest if you want, I'll call it completely ludicrous. First off anyone driving like our "hero" through the streets of New York would have gotten himself killed about 37 times over during this chase. And innocent bystanders would certainly have been plowed over as well. But forgetting all that the whole chase is completely unnecessary because our "hero" is chasing a subway train. Which of course is on tracks. Which means it's only going one place. Which means any cop with half a brain would simply have called for backup and had officers sent to all the stations along the route. Did he think the train was going to make a sudden, unexpected turn and head for Poughkeepsie? Our "hero" cop risked lives for what? For nothing. This completely illogical scene exists for no reason other than to have an exciting scene in the movie. Which I guess is understandable because this movie was sorely lacking exciting scenes. But this scene ends up being much more laughable than exciting.
Gene Hackman does pretty well in his role as obsessive, abrasive, bigoted cop Popeye Doyle who you get the sense is always a moment away from completely losing his mind. It's a pretty interesting character in a film mostly devoid of interesting characters. Playing Doyle's much more reserved partner Roy Scheider doesn't get to chew scenery like Hackman. Scheider's character is much more believable if not particularly compelling. This film's problems don't lie with its two lead performers. Hackman and Scheider were fine. It's everything around them which disappoints.
Anyhow, the threadbare plot here involves a couple of New York City narcotics cops investigating a shipment of drugs coming into the city from France. The movie immediately establishes who the bad guys are and exactly how their smuggling operation works so there's no mystery here. This is no whodunit. We know who the bad guys are, the cops know who the bad guys are and then...nothing. The bad guys drive around the city and the cops follow them. For an occasional change of pace the bad guys get out of their cars and walk around the city...and the cops follow them. Not a whole lot of anything going on here. Until THAT scene. The "greatest chase scene ever". Well, you call it greatest if you want, I'll call it completely ludicrous. First off anyone driving like our "hero" through the streets of New York would have gotten himself killed about 37 times over during this chase. And innocent bystanders would certainly have been plowed over as well. But forgetting all that the whole chase is completely unnecessary because our "hero" is chasing a subway train. Which of course is on tracks. Which means it's only going one place. Which means any cop with half a brain would simply have called for backup and had officers sent to all the stations along the route. Did he think the train was going to make a sudden, unexpected turn and head for Poughkeepsie? Our "hero" cop risked lives for what? For nothing. This completely illogical scene exists for no reason other than to have an exciting scene in the movie. Which I guess is understandable because this movie was sorely lacking exciting scenes. But this scene ends up being much more laughable than exciting.
Gene Hackman does pretty well in his role as obsessive, abrasive, bigoted cop Popeye Doyle who you get the sense is always a moment away from completely losing his mind. It's a pretty interesting character in a film mostly devoid of interesting characters. Playing Doyle's much more reserved partner Roy Scheider doesn't get to chew scenery like Hackman. Scheider's character is much more believable if not particularly compelling. This film's problems don't lie with its two lead performers. Hackman and Scheider were fine. It's everything around them which disappoints.