Just like Norwegian Hans Petter Moland his successful and exceptional black humor thriller “Kraftidioten” (alternative name is “In the Order of Disappearance”) which I transferred to new conditions a year later and recorded a much weaker American version called “Cold Pursuit” “, the renowned French filmmaker Christian Carion took the same path.
Although this experienced screenwriter and director is still best known for the Oscar-nominated “Joyeux Noel”, a historical drama about a truce in the trenches for Christmas 1914, he shot in France in 2017 an exciting thriller / drama “Mon Garcon” (My son or “My Son” in English) with Guillame Canet and Melanie Laurent in the lead roles. And just as Molland moved the Norwegian version of his film to America with only new actors and in a new language, so now Carion has made a copy-paste to the UK.
Instead of Canet and Laurent, James McAvoy and Claire Foy jumped into the lead roles, but the concept is the same. Their seven-year-old son has disappeared while camping, and after his ex-wife calls him in tears and reveals it to him, Edmond Murray (McAvoy) will set off in pursuit and search for him in the Scottish Highlands.
To all those who have watched the French original, this will seem like a complete deja vu, and again Carion has applied the same somewhat anarchic and improvisational concept. Just as he had given Canet only six pages a few years earlier to characterize his character and told him to improvise and navigate the familiar story himself, now the same fate befell McAvoy. This explains a lot of bizarre situations and hollow dialogues in this completely generic film, but little of it worked in this bizarre experiment in which I was most shocked that everything is exactly the same as in the original and that Carion did not give himself a little effort to get some details changes. Rating 6/10.
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