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La Haine Movie Review

La Haine is a 1995 French crime film directed by Mathieu Kassovitz and starring Vincent Cassel in his debut role. It’s not a great movie, but it remains an effective crime saga.

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“So far so good…

So far so good…

So far so good“

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After a youth is tortured by the police, a riot explodes on the streets of Paris. Vinz, Said and Hubert find a gun lost by the police in the riots and threaten to kill a cop if their friend dies. 2019’s ‘Les Miserables’ was a similar film in terms of subject matter, and La Haine is definitely stronger than that one, though it still pales in comparison to the much better ‘Do the Right Thing’, a film that was a clear influence to this French movie.

This is the type of movie that is not my cup of tea personally, so I will thus never be able to properly enjoy it, but I did appreciate it for everything that it did right. First and foremost, the black-and-white cinematography is stark and timeless. It made the film very unique and some of the urban imagery and interesting camera shots and takes elevated the material at hand significantly.

La Haine is very well directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. It’s phenomenally acted as well. Both Hubert Kounde and Said Taghmaoui delivered strong performances in underdeveloped roles, but it is Vincent Cassel who stole the movie from everybody else. This is his debut performance and he was so memorable in it. Not just was his acting superb, but his face lends itself well for the big screen and the result is an emotionally riveting, striking performance.

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These actors are solidly developed, but not to the point that I cared what would happen to them, thus the third act wasn’t as emotional to me as it was to others. The biggest issue for me was that frenetic pacing. The film is so briskly paced and so rushed that it was too overwhelming. It can be viewed as this cinematic, kinetic piece, but to me it was more frustrating than fully exhilarating. The dialogue was believable and so was the overall plot, but for the most part the movie failed to transcend its crime genre conventions, not commenting on racial tensions within Paris as extensively as I’d hoped it would.