French Connection II
The difficult second album syndrome strikes again. Actually, this suffers from a lack of editing: remove the War on Drugs element in the middle and you get a solid action film, a low rent Bourne meets Hardcore Henry, of all things.
So Popeye is sent to Marseille to get Frog 1, on loan to the French police. What he doesn’t know, is that he is to be used as bait, by letting him roam free. The first time he is out of the station, he fucks up.
He is of course caught by Frog 1’s criminal organisation (worthy of a Bond villain), trapped on a sleazy hotel and pumped full of heroin for weeks. After the cops finally catch him, he has to recover cold turkey in a police basement, so that no one knows he is an addict (which he isn’t!). After over-the-top suffering, he recovers both his health and the trust of French police chief.
Only then do we get worthy chase sequences, culminating on a rather anti-climatic finale where he shoots Frog 1 from afar, followed by cutting to credits. Sacré bleu!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.