Love Crime

Love Crime may not have much to do with love, but the crimes are meanly delicious.

The movie veers off in a different direction about two-thirds of the way through; the shift is initially jarring but eventually rewarding.

Would anyone really perpetrate a scheme as complicated and risky as Isabelle's? Not likely - but that's why we go to the movies.

This is a ridiculous movie - a thriller so indifferent to suspense, so above mystery that one character literally stabs another in the front.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Especially one in a power suit, who knows how to work a room.

On the one hand, you have to admire such obsessive mise en scene; on the other, there's something wrong with a suspense film when the sets are more interesting than the characters.

It is strange how un-French the film really is: Roman Polanski would have had a field day with this material.

Despite the odd false note, Love Crime's depiction of corporate backstabbing is scarily believable, yet it's as a perversely twisted modern film noir that the film delivers its biggest pleasures.

While the second half is no stronger or weaker than the first, what it does confirm are any earlier suspicions that this is no more than a piece of competently executed French popcorn cinema along the lines of 2008's Anything For Her.

This French dramatic thriller is so gleefully trashy that it's rather entertaining, as long as you don't try to take it seriously. Sleek and seductive, it's a pungent tale that plays out like a particularly lurid corporate soap.

Implausible perhaps, but the twists on Working Girl and All About Eve are intriguing and strongly acted.

What a disappointment.