Forces spéciales (2011): My unexpected foray into French movies

Forces spéciales (Special Forces) was a movie I started watching without knowing that it was a French movie. My first intent was to stop playing the DVD since I did not understand French, however the subtitles helped. Despite the movie being in French, an action movie buff that I am could not resist continuing to watch the movie. To talk about Special Forces in short I can call it as a tale of survival. Whenever I watch a war based action movie, I always tend to benchmark it against one of my all-time favourites Tears of the Sun. Did Special Forces beat my benchmark or did it fail?

The movie features a rich cast of actors in Diane Kruger (Elsa), Djimon Hounsou (Kovax), Benoît Magimel (Tic-Tac), Denis Menochet (Lucas) and Raphaël Personnaz (Elias). The movie was made at an estimated budget of €10,000,000 and released in France on 2nd November 2011.

After watching the movie I started reading some reviews on some of my favourite blogs and entertainment sites to see fans and authors have taken the movie in two different ways. Some consider it to be propaganda to advertise the French Special Forces while others have classified it as a tell-tale struggle between humanity and cruelty.

So finally, Special Forces is the story of the French Special Forces and their mission, in this instance, to save journalists who have been kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan and taken to the tribal areas of Pakistan. The movie story line resembles very closely to Tears of the Sun where Bruce Willis and his team is send to Africa to extract Dr. Lena Hendricks (Monica Bellucci). In Special Forces we do not have Bruce Willis nor Monica Bellucci, but we have Djimon Hounsou and Diane Kruger. Diane Kruger, a French journalist covering a story on atrocities committed over women in war torn Afghanistan is kidnapped by a kill-crazed Al Qaeda leader Zaief (Raz Degan) and taken to a tribal village on the border of Pakistan.

Djimon Hounsou’s team’s mission is to enter Pakistan and extract the journalist and her accomplice Amin. The rest of the movie is a startling array of machine guns, choppers, hand grenades – a typical Battlefield. During the trek back to their extraction point their choppers take fire from the henchmen of Zaief. This takes them to Plan B which is to trek the mountains and cross over to Afghanistan. During this journey they pass through rubbles, mountains, a snow storm, a land slide and more henchmen hunting them.

What happens further to the mission is what keeps us glued to couch, with an interesting ending which in my opinion was quite similar to Tears of the Sun but yet better. My take on the movie was that it was a mix of being a platform to portray the French patriotism and struggle between humanity and cruelty. I would recommend this movie to any action movie buff.

A good first movie by Stéphane Rybojad.

-Chalked by Premdas Kanaran