Tigers and Hyenas on Prime Video: what is the French gangster film worth? (critical)
A solid thriller which confirms the know-how of Jérémie Guez.
After his series BISJérémie Guez continues with a new thriller. This time he abandons the cops and the taciturn atmosphere, to focus on a group of nervous and lively gangsters. On paper Tigers and Hyenas looks like a pretty common platform production. A young thug joins forces with two converted thugs. His goal? Get his father-in-law out of prison and to do so, carry out an improbable heist.
Sofiane Zermani, Vincent Perez, Olivier Martinez and the excellent Waël Sersoub therefore respond in a chrome thriller with summary executions, chases and betrayals of all kinds. There is a pleasure of communicative cinema in Guez, a way of paying homage to the classics of the genre (through the plot, the dialogues, the way of portraying his characters) which makes his film as tense as it is playful. We have already seen this several times, but Guez lets his personality infuse and, without reinventing the codes of the genre, he creates a very straightforward film.
Humor, relaxation (Fianso with a very relaxed game, aided by well-crafted sentences, is once again fantastic), as the spectacular execution of the action scenes makes this film very recommendable. Not the thriller of the century, but halfway between the thug film tradition made in France (we think of Melville or Jules Dassin) and the Hollywood heist film (a little nod to the Ocean family?), Guez cements his solid and intriguing film a little more. We are waiting for the sequel.
