The Connection tells the story of Pierre Michel (Jean Dujardin of The Artist fame), a magistrate who is promoted to head of the local organized crime unit. Faced with the task of dismantling Marseilles’s heroin-peddling trade, Michel is put up against the Marseilles mob, spearheaded by drug lord Gaëtan “Tany” Zampa (Gilles Lellouche).
Shot on 35-millimetre, the film looks and feels appropriately vintage. It is apparent that the production team went to great lengths to recreate the vibe of 1975, with flare-collared suits, bulky sideburns, and decade-appropriate vehicles effortlessly situating the audience within the era. Where The Connection struggles, however, is in its ability – or lack thereof – to achieve a balance between style and substance. The film gets caught up in crime drama tropes, coming off as indubitably stylish but altogether formulaic.
Rife with blues-rock montages and set to blues-rock, The Connection feels like watered-down Scorsese, with cinematographer Laurent Tangy even going so far as to whip out a two-minute tracking shot around Zampa’s red-tinted club, following an array of seedy mob associates, à la Goodfellas. Perhaps these types of montages have embedded themselves comfortably within the stylistic lexicon of crime cinema, but seeing them used so liberally in The Connection made me wonder whether it was generous homage or overused stereotype.
These instances of flashiness are complemented with brief entries of gritty realism, in which we follow Michel’s rigorous and unglamorous criminal investigation. But even here, the script panders to convention, with Dujardin doing the best he can with Michel, whose boilerplate characterization never truly allows him to put in anything more than a satisfactory performance.
At 135 minutes, The Connection is a bit long and is especially bloated in its third act, when the plot unravels and grows muddled. It fails to live up to its potential — uninspired and conventional, it is the product of a filmmaker who has a working proficiency in crime cinema language, but lacks a unique voice of his own.
Verdict: A competent, if uninspired, addition to the crime film family.
