Originally appeared in Film Inquiry.

One seldom comes across a 90-minute film suffused with continual action, car chases, fistfights, gunshots, and every other action-genre troupe, and yet feel lethargic. The French-language Netflix original Lost Bullet pulls off this onerous task and even manages to put off our interest within the compact time frame despite fitting all the aforementioned facets. It’s probably because these facets feel forcedly appended rather than coming off as requisites to the script. They’re more of a garnish than the main ingredient, and it’s a film that relies on the garnish to embellish the final film while ignoring a very basic necessity: a coherent script. The action and the garnish do bolster to an extent, though, if not completely alleviate the issue caused by the absence of strong writing….continue reading here.