FRANTIC (1988) - ***1/2

A surgeon (Harrison Ford) and his wife are visiting Paris for a medical conference when at their hotel room they realize that she picked up the wrong suitcase back at the airport. She gets on the phone, he takes a shower, he gets out and she's vanished. Suffering from severe Jet lag, ignorant of the French tongue, and getting no worthy help from the police and American Embassy, he scours the city for her. He's lonely, he's desperate, he's FRANTIC.

After reading that, either you're intrigued enough to get onboard to explore such a set-up, or you're not. If the latter, I suggest for you DISTURBIA, a dumb direct recent uninspired boring picture made for folks who can't wipe their own ass, and get the hell out of my review. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. But if FRANTIC sounds like good popcorn, which it is...then welcome to the rest of the review. Enjoy.

I think it was in the middle of FRANTIC when I realized that the extra pleasure beyond the surface is seeing the filmmakers obviously having a good swell time with the material. Writer/Director Roman Polanski has shot alot of terrific thrillers from KNIFE IN THE WATER to REPULSION to ROSEMARY'S BABY to the underseen THE TENANT, my point is he knows his stuff. FRANTIC isn't one of his better works, but like with Brian DePalma on FEMME FATALE and Martin Scorsese with CAPE FEAR, we benefit mostly from him having fun in playing in the Hitchcock sandbox again, what with the step-by-step paranoia mystery with shadow-lit alleyways and ominous garages. This includes the legendary composer Ennio Morricone, who himself is willing to play Bernard Herrmann to Polanski's Hitch with the trumpets and strings to stress up the suspense and tension.

Ford himself is a man lost and adrift, a everyday man fighting against unseen enemies in an alien culture, insurmountable odds stacked against him. I always thought he was miscasted in his Jack Ryan adventures if simply because for an analyst-turned-actioneer, you expect such heroics from Indiana Jones or Han Solo. But in FRANTIC you buy his vulnerability and helplessness, that he doesn't do this crazyness for a living. I think the difference is that Polanski puts a strong emphasis in close-ups and framing on Ford's face, and you realize that Ford once upon a time could be a terrific actor. I mean in recent years with K-19 and FIREWALL and the Internet-hated INDY IV, you forget that fact but his facial expression do alot more justice for FRANTIC than mere expositional dialogue.

Take the 3rd act, the home stretch for the genre to wind itself up, Ford is on the phone with the Embassy when they put him on hold. His eyes first display shock, then fustration, then outright seething anger, or in other words the classic look of "What the Fuck?!?" Such scenes in most thrillers are placed in 1st Act, you know to build up the problems a hero has to face on his quest. But such a sequence holds our attention more by being written here, against expectations.

Some critics have criticized FRANTIC for bringing nothing "new" and creative to the table, and that's probably true, but so what? I think to steal an argument from the great Internet critic The Outlaw Vern, genre films are like the blues music in that you've been through a combination of the same plottings, scenes, and situations a thousand before, and a thousand times afterwards, but you can still compose them to make them still effective for even the most experienced film buffs, and with your own authorship.

Polanski does that with FRANTIC in a few shots, like how a potential lead for Ford at a night club is revealed to be an embarrasing misunderstanding, one that he can't express because he doesn't want to piss his only possible link to his kidnapped wife. I even liked how after a shoot-out where the driver of a car gets capped, you expect Ford and femme fatale Emmanuelle Seigner to push that dead bulk out and then drive in the pursuit, like you would expect with most movies. Nope, they don't have the time so instead they work the steering wheel around the corpse, while keeping his head up so daytime Parisians won't notice them. Then after parking, Ford belatedly tries CPR on the body, as if to try to escape blame for that death in the eyes of bystanders.

My favorite scene though is the opening, which may surprise many for being so mundane. Ford and his wife in a taxicab that gets a flat tire, and the driver pulls over to repair it. I liked a fact that I've forgotten, which is that when people speak in a foreign language you don't comprehend, you automatically ignore it. I mean why would your ears pay attention to mere gibberish? Plus, FRANTIC instantly dispels that this isn't the postcard Paris, where Polanski has resided since his legal exile, we see in almost every other mainstream movie. No accordian music, no berets, no mimes, no Eiffel Tower in every shot (hell, unless I'm mistaken, it's not seen at all) or any of that nonsense that TEAM AMERICA wonderfully mocked. But I like all this because it slickly butters you up for what is to come.

I do think that FRANTIC suffers because the second half with the revelations, plot turns and a dramatic finisher this side of SABOTEUR over a MacGuffin doesn't quite something compute as well as the first half did. Reportedly 10-20 minutes were axed by Warner Bros. from the final cut, which may or may not be true, and may or may not have affected Polanski's narrative energy output. But otherwise, FRANTIC is a pretty good routine genre thriller with some nice touches that was Polanski's career comeback after PIRATES, one of the biggest flops of the Reagan Decade, and more than anything else FRANTIC is a good reminder of when Ford was relevant.

Speaking of which, notice signs of Ford's homeland all across Paris, such Americanization from some of the music to Coca-Cola advertizements, to even the Pizza Hut next to his hotel. All this is a good allegory for his character's search for his wife: So Close, and Yet so Far Away.