Saeed Roustayi’s tense policier about a cop hunting a drug kingpin deftly mixes brutality and gallows farce
This increasingly nerve-jangling narco policier from Life and a Day writer-director Saeed Roustayi, who has since made the feted 2022 Palme d’Or contender Leila’s Brothers, was hailed as Iran’s highest-grossing non-comedic domestic film. Not that Law of Tehran (Aka Just 6.5), which won the audience award at Iran’s Fajr film festival back in 2019, is without a pointedly nihilistic streak of jet-black humour. For proof, check out the horrifyingly absurdist opening salvo: a drug bust that turns into a breakneck, on-foot chase sequence, climaxing in a lethal disappearing act that combines the vérité grit of The French Connection with the physical slapstick of Buster Keaton. Really. It’s a deliberately bewildering cocktail of brutal tragedy and gallows farce that runs throughout this very arresting feature.
Playing out amid the human...
This increasingly nerve-jangling narco policier from Life and a Day writer-director Saeed Roustayi, who has since made the feted 2022 Palme d’Or contender Leila’s Brothers, was hailed as Iran’s highest-grossing non-comedic domestic film. Not that Law of Tehran (Aka Just 6.5), which won the audience award at Iran’s Fajr film festival back in 2019, is without a pointedly nihilistic streak of jet-black humour. For proof, check out the horrifyingly absurdist opening salvo: a drug bust that turns into a breakneck, on-foot chase sequence, climaxing in a lethal disappearing act that combines the vérité grit of The French Connection with the physical slapstick of Buster Keaton. Really. It’s a deliberately bewildering cocktail of brutal tragedy and gallows farce that runs throughout this very arresting feature.
Playing out amid the human...
- 4/2/2023
- by Mark Kermode, Observer film criic
- The Guardian - Film News
In Tehran, getting caught with 30 grams of illegal drugs carries the same sentence as being busted with 50 kilos. Either way, perps face the death penalty — which means the dealers might as well get ambitious. And so they have, driving up the rates of Iranian drug abuse from roughly one million addicts to somewhere in the ballpark of 6.5 million. Still, if it weren’t for such draconian punishments — and the dedication of the Anti-Narcotics Police Task Force who enforce them — the number would be much higher, which explains the title of director Saeed Roustaee’s “Just 6.5,” a riveting, ripped-from-reality thriller that delivers a searing look at a serious problem.
A tense blow-by-blow account of a major bust — from a spectacular back-alley raid through to its grim conclusion at the gallows, where a big-fish supplier uses every ploy to escape execution — “Just 6.5” is part adrenaline-shot action movie and part detail-obsessed bureaucratic procedural.
A tense blow-by-blow account of a major bust — from a spectacular back-alley raid through to its grim conclusion at the gallows, where a big-fish supplier uses every ploy to escape execution — “Just 6.5” is part adrenaline-shot action movie and part detail-obsessed bureaucratic procedural.
- 11/7/2019
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
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