The debut feature by critic-turned-screenwriter Cédric Anger (Le Petit lieutenant), Le Tueur is one of those sleek Gallic crime dramas that spends its first quarter seemingly revving up to be a thriller only to decide it’s quite comfortable cruising in fourth gear. This is not necessarily a bad thing: moody and largely uneventful save for a handful of muted revelations, Anger’s film gets by on a sort of inverted flair derived from a monochromatic tone and the pained facial expressions of his lead actors.
A swaggering opening sequence — set effectively to Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge” — introduces us to Kopas (Grégoire Colin), a contracted hit man on assignment in Paris. In short order we meet his mark, Léo (Gilbert Melki), a successful investor and dedicated father whose nervous demeanor betrays some dark secrets the stone-faced Kopas grows uncharacteristically curious about. That these two men end up meeting and forming a complementary rapport is part of Anger’s neat puzzle. The whole thing is a bit too predictable to qualify as a mystery (its “gotcha” moments are more like “oh yeah”s), it does take on creeping interest as a character study of its principals.
For dialogue and emotional weight, Le Tueur pales next to Le Petit lieutenant, which Anger co-wrote with director Xavier Beauvois, and there’s a sense that, in different hands in a different setting, Le Tueur could’ve come up plenty lame. It’s a credit, perhaps, to Anger’s promise as a director that it doesn’t.