Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 21, 2016, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
When Mario Bava’s long-lost Rabid Dogs (a.k.a. Kidnapped) was finally unveiled in 1998, it proved to be a journey into uncharted territory for the Italian maestro. The remake, on the other hand, looks and sounds like an awful lot of other modern Eurocrime thrillers.
Rabid Dogs, which Bava shot in 1974 but was held up by legal concerns until well after his death, saw the director eschewing his usual lush Gothic castles and vividly colored fantasy worlds for something more hard-edged in both tone and visuals. Restricting much of the action to a car commandeered by desperate, hostage-taking criminals on the lam, Bava created a grim, claustrophobic, intense ordeal for the viewer. The new version (a.k.a. Enragés), which marks the directorial debut of French journalist-turned-producer Éric Hannezo, employs essentially the same plot, to which he applies a gliding camera, occasional primary-color lighting and ironic/complementary pop songs (including the Vega Choir cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” popularized by the Social Network trailer), but can’t sustain the same level of tension and unease.
Here, the crooks rob a bank instead of an armored truck, but once again, they lose one of their number during the ensuing getaway—in this case, their “chief,” played by Alleluia’s Laurent Lucas. That leaves Sabri (Guillaume Gouix), who has a bit of an anger-management problem, to take over leading the downright deranged Vincent (Francois Arnaud) and somewhat reluctant Manu (Franck Gastambide) in a violent bid to escape. They first take a honeymooning tourist (Virginie Ledoyen) hostage, then decide they need a new getaway vehicle and carjack a father (Lambert Wilson) trying to get his 4-year-old daughter to a hospital for a much-needed transplant. That latter note should add an extra note of anxiousness as the bad guys force him to drive out of the city, and Hannezo further attempts to up the urgency by dropping in frequent title cards informing us of the time.
It never quite gels, though, even as the group run into one police stop after another and the father has to get them past without drawing attention, and Vincent can’t keep his perverted hands off Ledoyen’s character. (Her abuse isn’t nearly as bad as that suffered by her counterpart in Bava’s version, but it’s still a pretty thankless part for the talented actress.) There’s insufficient distinction to the trio of toughs from the countless trigger-happy types seen in so many previous crime/survival films, and Hannezo and co-scripters Yannick Dahan (who wrote and directed the urban zombie opus The Horde) and Benjamin Rataud don’t make enough of a few dramatically promising developments, as when Manu, the least brutal of the group, accidentally shoots another hostage out of sheer nervousness during the early going.
At about the hour mark, the characters and the film take an odd detour into a rural town where the residents (including a briefly seen Robert Maillet, from The Strain, 300 and others) are taking part in a paganistic celebration called “The Feast of the Bear.” It’s not clear what the narrative point of this ritual is—and it puts one in mind of Julian Gilbey’s far superior, still underappreciated A Lonely Place to Die—but it does add a bit of extra ominous mood to a film that is overall eerily well-shot by Kamal Derkaoui on starkly picturesque Canadian locations. (Random trivia connections: Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs, another French production lensed in Canada, also has a remake out now, and Ledoyen and Derkaoui are veterans of other Laugier films—House of Voices and The Tall Man, respectively.)
Then again, this story should be less about the landscapes and more about the hothouse atmosphere inside the car, which Bava engendered so well and too often dissipates in the update. A couple of Bava’s in-vehicle interludes have been eliminated here (including the one with the mouthy hitchhiker), though Hannezo does, of course, retain the twist ending that throws the entire story into new relief—with a notable change in delivery. In the original, the punchline is conveyed when a character makes a phone call; here, we simply hear about it via a radio news bulletin. This Rabid Dogs’ Big Reveal is a passive rather than an active one, which winds up reflecting the overall experience of watching it.
