It’s finally here, what could be the final installment in an action series that’s been wall-to-wall excitement, with twists and turns and all sorts of things crashing into each other.
What’s that? Mission: Impossible? Ohhhh, no no no. What I’m talking about, of course, is the third part of the French-language Lost Bullet trilogy, this one with the appropriate English title Last Bullet. And as someone who has generally found himself bored with action movies over the last couple decades, believe me when I say these Lost Bullet movies are some really good, grimy, car-crunching fun.
The first film tells us what the whole thing is going to be within five minutes, as our soon-to-be hero Lino drives a car through a jewelry store wall in an attempt to rob the place. What he doesn’t expect is to go entirely through the store and out the back wall into an alley, where he’s picked up by police and hauled off to jail. Soon, he’s recruited by a special police unit that targets high-speed drug traffickers, and the whole series is set in motion.
The trilogy has a lot going for it, largely because it tends to take the situations seriously and doesn’t complicate things—Lino mostly has one thing on his mind in each film, and while the world around that might get complicated, his motivation isn’t, particularly. And the action is real action—the movies feel like they occupy actual physical space, even when what we’re seeing is absurd, and they understand the inherent attraction of tossing real cars off bridges and ramming huge trucks into each other. It’d be hard to watch the Lost Bulletmovies and not think of the Mad Max series, if that tells you anything about the quality of these car chases and crashes. And this third film sets up some fun situations with Lino fighting bad guys who are also fighting each other, and villains doing some real reaping of what they’ve spent three movies sowing.
The entire Lost Bullet trilogy is on Netflix, and whatever Tom Cruise may be doing this weekend, let me tell you he would not be happy to see Lino barreling down the highway toward him.
