Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
The charismatic criminal Dobermann, who got his first gun when he was christened, leads a gang of brutal robbers. After a complex and brutal bank robbery, they are being hunted by the Paris police. The hunt is led by the sadistic cop Christini, who only has one goal: to catch Dobermann at any cost.
Dobermann is a visually bombastic French crime film from Jan Kounen that leans heavily into style over substance. The cinematography is genuinely exceptional — frenetic, hyper-stylized with extreme angles, saturated colors, and a music-video energy that was striking for its era and remains distinctive. The acting, led by Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci, is committed and charismatic even if the characters are thin archetypes. The plot is paper-thin, essentially a chase scaffold with little narrative depth or coherence — it exists purely to string together set pieces. The ending is abrupt and unsatisfying, feeling more like the film simply runs out of momentum than reaches a conclusion. Novelty is moderate — the hyper-stylized aesthetic borrowed from music videos and comic books was relatively fresh in European cinema at the time, though it echoes Tarantino and Hong Kong action influences.