Frantic

Scripted by Polanski with his long-time collaborator, Gérard Brach, Frantic is an overlong espionage thriller that starts well enough but by its mid-point loses all its drive in crudely generic plotting and Polanskils directorial off-handedness.

Harrison Ford plays an American surgeon, Richard Walker, who is visiting Paris with his wife, Sondra (Betty Buckley) for a medical conference. Within minutes she mysteriously disappears from their hotel room and alone and unable to speak the language Walker begins to search for her.  

Many will appreciate the Hitchcockian understatement of the first half of the film as Walker goes about trying to work out what has happened to his wife, approaching a variety of largely unhelpful people who generally believe that she’s simply gone AWOL.  About midway however he finds what he thinks might be a lead and he’s immediately up to his neck in Parisian nightlife, drugs, Grace Jones and keeping company with the Natassja Kinski-looking Emmanuelle Seigner. a tarty drug smuggler and eventual accomplice.

It is at this point that the film loses momentum, mechanically working its way through one after another plot twist that barely hang together and action sequences that are nothing short of clumsy with Polanski subjecting his mini-skirted soon-to-be wife Seigner to some very undignified scenes. What has appeared to be some kind of drug cartel movie turns into an anachronistic espionage thriller that particularly in the last fifteen or twenty minutes, is worthy only of Hitchcock of the late failures such as Topaz (1968) and Torn Curtain (1966).

Carrying most of the dramatic weight, Ford, a blank canvas of an actor who is entirely dependent on his material and director is bland to uninteresting and bar a few individual scenes there is little to recommend the film as a whole.

 

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