Racer and the Jailbird

Name: Racer and the Jailbird
Genre: Drama, Crime
Released: May 4, 2018
Duration: 130 min
Rating: 50
Cast: Ad, Corentin Lobet, Eric De Staercke, Fabien Magry, Gaël Maleux

2018

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Mixed or average reviews based on 17 Critic Reviews

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Mixed or average reviews based on 5 Ratings

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Racer And The Jailbird

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Movie Details & Credits

Kinepolis Film Distribution (KFD) | Release Date: May 4, 2018 | Not Rated

Starring: Ad, Corentin Lobet, Eric De Staercke, Fabien Magry, Gaël Maleux, Guray Nalbant, Igor van Dessel, Jean-Benoît Ugeux, Kerem Can, Matthias Schoenaerts, Nabil Missoumi, Nathalie Van Tongelen, Sam Louwyck, Stefaan Degand, Thomas Coumans

Summary: As a member of a notorious Brussels gang renowned for their expertly-executed robberies, Gigi (Matthias Schoenaerts) tends to his front, a luxury automobile import-export business, in his downtime. Sparks fly when he meets glamorous and affluent race car driver Bibi (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and despite their wildly different backgrounds, theAs a member of a notorious Brussels gang renowned for their expertly-executed robberies, Gigi (Matthias Schoenaerts) tends to his front, a luxury automobile import-export business, in his downtime. Sparks fly when he meets glamorous and affluent race car driver Bibi (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and despite their wildly different backgrounds, the pair fall instantly and tragically in love. While Gigi attempts to break away from his illicit history, two things stand in the couple’s way to a happy life together: an unrelenting mob hungry for another heist, and the cops that are closing in on them.… Expand

Director: Michael R. Roskam

Genre(s): Drama, Crime

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 130 min

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Critic Reviews

Jessica Kiang

May 2, 2018

One of the most undersung and most potent pleasures of genre cinema is the excuse it has given us, time and again, to watch attractive people fall in love with each other, and if you’re in a romantic frame of mind, Racer and the Jailbird delivers so wholly on that front that it goes a fair way toward compensating for the film’s deficiencies elsewhere. Read full review

Noel Murray

May 2, 2018

Racer and the Jailbird remains absorbing throughout, thanks primarily to the two leads, who are both almost frighteningly believable as lovers willing to risk everything to stay together. Read full review

Owen Gleiberman

May 2, 2018

The whole thing becomes drenched in a kind of downbeat sentimental martyrdom that feels oppressively old-fashioned and moribund. Read full review

Eric Kohn

May 2, 2018

Racer and the Jailbird speeds along at an engaging clip, but never overcomes the fundamental simplicity of its plot. Read full review

Josh Kupecki

May 9, 2018

While the story starts fast and furious, it sputters in its second half, not so much running out of gas as just turning into a completely different film which becomes increasingly more convoluted as it becomes less engaging. Read full review

Jeannette Catsoulis

May 3, 2018

The two leads are sensational, but the movie, drained of its life force and stuffed with confusing plot complications — like a shoehorned-in undercover agent and some mysterious Albanians — never recovers. Read full review

The Film Stage Mike Mazzanti

May 10, 2018

A gripping highway heist sequence and two affecting lead performances are surrounded by a film that mistakes the knowledge of sadness for its authentication. Read full review

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Bertaut1

Aug 12, 2018

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. What a shambles

Le Fidèle [lit. trans. The Faithful] is an absolute mess, and one of the most egregious examples I've ever encountered of a narrative systematically undermining and imploding in on top of itself, unable to bear the weight of a litany of clichés and melodrama. The incongruity between the first 90 or so minutes of Fidèle and the last half-hour is truly bizarre, as the script inexplicably morphs from a heist movie into a pseudo disease-of-the-week based tearjerker wholly convinced of its own profundity.

Written by Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré, and Michaël R. Roskam, and directed by Roskam, Fidèle chugs along nicely at first - a little overwrought, but well put together and enjoyable enough. It's a fairly familiar story; essentially, will the love of a good woman save the recidivist criminal with a heart of gold? Gino "Gigi" Vanoirbeek (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a thief masquerading as a car salesman. Bénédicte "Bibi" Delhany (Adèle Exarchopoulos) works for her father (Eric De Staercke) at his construction company, but spends her free time on the race track. They are introduced by her brother Bernard (Thomas Coumans), who doesn't know what Gigi really does, and they quickly fall in love. However, as time goes by, Gigi finds it increasingly difficult to keep the truth of what he does away from a suspicious Bibi.

This plot summary takes us through the first act and into the second. And then the bottom falls out, as the screenplay makes one of the most bizarre about-turns I've ever seen. However, it's not only the fact that the film has an identity crisis and morphs into something completely different. One might forgive that if that something different was well written. As a heist movie, Fidèle works pretty well, but as a tearjerker, it's horrendous. For starters, Roskam tries to cram far too much into a short space of time. The last half hour of the film jumps all over the place from Bibi's dad being blackmailed to Gigi's recidivism catching up with him to trouble conceiving a child to ovarian cancer to chemotherapy to mysterious Albanians who can't be trusted to a dogfighting ring. And with Bibi on the brink of death, when Gigi arrives in the hospital to see her, she's already slipped into a coma. So they never get to say goodbye. Then he gets beaten up. Twice.

Roskam handles all of this with a spectacularly misguided solemnity that ends up manifesting itself as nothing other than mawkishness. He just keeps on piling melodrama on top of cliché on top of angst. The audience at the screening I attended actually started laughing as the characters experienced misfortune after misfortune after misfortune. It just never ends, and, most unforgivingly, the suffering has absolutely no cathartic effect whatsoever, it just exists in a vacuum of its own making; there's no moral component, no sense in which any of the characters come out the other side having learnt something, and the audience itself certainly doesn't experience any kind of emotional purification, any sense in which their pity or fear has been engaged or purged.

And what's especially frustrating is that the film's individual components are well put together. The acting is strong (it would be almost unwatchable were the acting anything less than exemplary), and Roskam's direction is predictably solid (the aesthetic centrepiece is a brilliantly staged three or four minute single take shot of a complex heist on a motorway). Hell, even the end of the film, the final sequence as Gigi drives across the city, is brilliantly shot, and the revelation that an earlier conversation with Bibi continued after he joked that he was a bank robber really caught me by surprise. And the last line is superb (it's also more emotive than all the melodrama in the preceding half hour).

However, although the destination is pretty satisfying, how we have gotten there is so ludicrous that it renders any sense of accomplishment null and void. It's just a shame, because although, in an isolated sense, most of the film is well done, the totality is a disaster. A huge disappointment from a director who only seven years ago showed all the promise in the world.… Expand

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