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Review:
 Sports
is one of those activities that can be the stuff of legend. There
are thousands of sports films, and many of them are quite good.
But precious few have come from France, almost none are as
perverse as this one. There was something like it recently called
“Hostel,” and that was anything but a sports story. But what if it
was?
Sébastien(George Babluani) is a young contractor fixing up the
house of a strange drug addict named Jean François Godon(Philippe
Passon), who's nagging wife is sure that he's going to kill
himself. He's also broke, and needs the money to pay our hero. He
has a plan. A mysterious stranger has just sent a certain offer in
the mail, and soon after getting it the expected happens. J-F ODs.
Through a bizarre happenstance, our hero gets his hands on the
letter, which contains instructions, a train ticket and a prepaid
hotel reservation. Sébastien decides to follow the instructions
and maybe get the loot that he
surreptitiously heard about.
So where does sports come in to it? Our hero finds himself in
the world of professional Russian roulette.
Now this might seem a spoiler, and it probably is, but the most
of the film is about the tournament, the guys who bet on who's
going to get a shot in the head, and how the players and the
officials interact, and the like. This is, in a way just like any
other sports movie except for the fact that it's about random
murder.
The acting is superb, the script brilliant, and it's really
exiting. This is the best film out of France in quite a while.
Eric Lurio
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