Prophet a loss?

A Prophet
Starring: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif
Director: Jacques Audiard
Rating: ** (out of 5)

Summary: A young Arab man goes to prison and finds out the hard way about the heirarchy of life behind bars. Caught between the turf wars of the Corsican and Middle Eastern prisoners, he must use all his wits and charm to work his way to the top.

Its french, its 3 hours long, it has a plot as hard to follow as Jason Bourne in a Russian taxi cab and its the best crime thriller since Goodfellas (apparently). Let me introduce A Prophet, the proverbial film critics jizz rag.

This isn't a backlash for backlash's sake - i'm simply annoyed. I believed them all. All the critics that wrote superlative after superlative about A Prophet. This isn't the second coming of the gangster genre, if you want that you should watch the epic Mesrine, which is a film that has the decency to split its running time over two films.

It's not a total waste of 1500 feet of celluloid. With its close camera work and overcrowded frames, you really feel the claustrophobic and horrific atmosphere that must permeate the walls of prison and the acting of Tahar Rahim is second to none. However, The Godfather - which A Prophet has been likened to - had a cast of support characters that demanded your attention and that is lacking here, with the supporting players merely underwritten cliches that fall into the background too easily.

As you can tell, A Prophet just didn't do it for me. The film is baggy, becomes incomprehensible once Rahim's Machiavellian rise to the top begins and it wallows in the stench of criminality it so readily judges.

Within and hour and a half I was checking my watch - and I don't even wear one. No doubt it will have recieved its gold plated glory once the awards season is over but it certainly won't deserve a single carot of it.