A French remake of the Korean film A Hard Day (2014), Restless stars Franck Gastambide as Thomas, a somewhat 'dirty' cop whose day goes from bad to worse after he accidentally runs over a man. Instead of reporting the incident, he plonks the body in the boot of his car and attempts to dispose of it via a rather convoluted method involving a toy soldier, some balloons, and his recently deceased mother's coffin. What he doesn't realise is that the dead man was a drug dealer who kept a key to a vault full of money stuck up his butt, and a really bad cop by the name of Marelli (Simon Abkarian) will do whatever it takes to get his hands on it.
What follows is rather preposterous, but enjoyable nonetheless, director Régis Blondeau achieving a fair amount of tension from his admittedly silly scenarios. Uncomfortable scenes involve the dead man's phone ringing at inopportune moments from inside Thomas's mother's coffin, a fight in a toilet cubicle (Thomas getting his head forced down the pan), an investigation by Thomas's colleagues into the hit-and-run incident, and an edge-of-the-seat countdown of some C4 explosive. There's also the rather yucky scene in which Thomas must retrieve the key from the dead man's butt -- thankfully we are spared the graphic details.
At the end of the film, almost everything that Thomas has done is brushed under the carpet by his superiors, which is a tad far-fetched (or is it?), but the very last scene is a sure-fire crowd-pleaser: having quit the force and donated his severance pay to his best friend's widow, Thomas's suffering finally pays off big time.
6/10. Not unmissable, but certainly entertaining.
What follows is rather preposterous, but enjoyable nonetheless, director Régis Blondeau achieving a fair amount of tension from his admittedly silly scenarios. Uncomfortable scenes involve the dead man's phone ringing at inopportune moments from inside Thomas's mother's coffin, a fight in a toilet cubicle (Thomas getting his head forced down the pan), an investigation by Thomas's colleagues into the hit-and-run incident, and an edge-of-the-seat countdown of some C4 explosive. There's also the rather yucky scene in which Thomas must retrieve the key from the dead man's butt -- thankfully we are spared the graphic details.
At the end of the film, almost everything that Thomas has done is brushed under the carpet by his superiors, which is a tad far-fetched (or is it?), but the very last scene is a sure-fire crowd-pleaser: having quit the force and donated his severance pay to his best friend's widow, Thomas's suffering finally pays off big time.
6/10. Not unmissable, but certainly entertaining.
