"Feux Rouges" ("Red Lights") is a small and trivial morality tale without clear morals and lacking much of a tale. It positions itself as an modern anomic road movie that aims to stuff fate, urban angst, loyalty, obligation and vice into a shake-and-bake sack, but in fact it's too weak to do much more than poke at its issues, half-heartedly and from a safe distance.
For a road movie, "Red Lights" is stingy on the wild and woolly vistas that should challenge, inspire, and tempt. It's a low budget film, fair enough, but the dark confine of the car where the bulk of the first half of the movie unfolds doesn't feel like a crucible of the nighttime world - it feels like not much is going on. We're given temptation, travail, and ultimately resolution, but they come almost at random and without force or direction. Why a one-armed man? What's with the whiskey? Do violent, deranged escaped prisoners really hang out for a few in the bar across from the train station? Are French cops really that dim? If that were you, wouldn't you have one rampaging mother-of-all-hangovers hangover the next day? For the answers to these and other questions, stay home. Better yet, go see something good.
For a road movie, "Red Lights" is stingy on the wild and woolly vistas that should challenge, inspire, and tempt. It's a low budget film, fair enough, but the dark confine of the car where the bulk of the first half of the movie unfolds doesn't feel like a crucible of the nighttime world - it feels like not much is going on. We're given temptation, travail, and ultimately resolution, but they come almost at random and without force or direction. Why a one-armed man? What's with the whiskey? Do violent, deranged escaped prisoners really hang out for a few in the bar across from the train station? Are French cops really that dim? If that were you, wouldn't you have one rampaging mother-of-all-hangovers hangover the next day? For the answers to these and other questions, stay home. Better yet, go see something good.