Empire of the Wolves Movie Review

Every once in awhile a movie comes along that is so nonsensical, so random, so stupid even, that it simply defies reviewing. 2005's edition is Empire of the Wolves, a film which appears to have gone straight to video despite starring Jean Reno.

The film opens interestingly, almost Matrix-like, as a woman (Arly Jover) is seen undergoing some kind of treatment for amnesia -- she can remember just about everyone except her husband. Increasingly suspicious and susceptible to flashbacks, she help from a psychiatrist who turns her on to the scars behind her ears and on her scalp. An x-ray reveals she's full of metal pins. Someone has done a major plastic surgery number on the gal. An hour into the 128-minute affair we get the film's primary revelation: Jover's Anna was once Turkish!

As ridiculous as that is, it only gets worse from there. Reno and his parter Jocelyn Quivrin (that's a man, baby) through a twisty maze of secret societies, gangs, illegal immigrants, mind control, and an absurd set of circumstances that could end with a Turkish woman being facially reconstructed and brainwashed into believing she's a demure French lass.

Somehow it took a novel and four screenwriters (including the novelist, who gets no slack here) to come up with this sad attempt to make the Turkish mafia a cinematic force on par with the Italian mafia or the Japanese yakuza. It doesn't work. True or not, the film makes the Turks look like a bunch of buffoons who couldn't run a crime organization if their lives depended on it -- and, apparently, it does.

The only way to make this film any worse is to listen to the dubbed version, which turns Reno's deep growl into a lilting voice that wouldn't be out of place on an episode of Friends.

Aka L'Empire des loups.