A man wakes up on a crowded bus. He’s in a strange neighborhood, with no idea how he got there. He just wants to get to the airport Radisson, but instead he’s in the middle of Dakar, Senegal, with a bomb strapped to his chest and a mysterious stranger crooning into his ear. This is a killer hook for a high-concept thriller, that’s for sure. To zoom out for a second, it’s important to note that director Jean Luc Herbulot burst onto the scene with 2021’s Saloum, a lean, slick thriller that effortlessly blended Carpenter-style widescreen vistas and supernatural horrors into a propulsive genre masterpiece. It’s unfortunate, then, that lightning hasn’t struck twice, as Herbulot’s new film, Zero, is as leaden as Saloum was sleek.
There’s a lot going on in Zero, and almost all of it is somehow miscalculated. Beginning its narrative in media res is a bold choice, but the thrills in Herbulot’s sophomore effort simply don’t make up for the lack of a traditional narrative or character work. The man on the bus is referred to only as One (played by Hus Miller, who also shares co-writer credit with the director). Meanwhile, the voice on the other end of the earpiece will be instantly identifiable to a broad swath of viewers as Willem Dafoe, although we never see his face over the course of the movie. One is desperate for help, but he doesn’t speak the language, and none of the locals speak English. As soon as he’s kicked off the bus, the police arrive; unable to communicate with them, and convinced by Dafoe that he’ll be arrested for terrorism, One goes on the run. Soon enough, Dafoe has steered One to another bomb-festooned victim, a poor sap referred to as Two (Cam McHarg). We don’t know anything about these men, and as more of their personalities are gradually revealed, they become more and more unappealing. One appears to be a money-launderer of some sort, and by his own admission, works for very dangerous people; Two is a brute, ready to throw down at a moment’s notice but otherwise monosyllabic. There’s a bit of comedy to their mismatched personalities — a fast-talking mover and shaker vs. the quiet wrecking ball — but their various quests remain confusing (to both them and the audience). It’s mostly lots of running, yelling, and gesticulating wildly, before more running as a CGI explosion goes off. There is a brief sequence involving a trip to a stronghold of child soldiers that suggests a kind of slapstick tone, but even that eccentricity is nonetheless quickly abandoned; like much of the film, it’s a zany idea that gets trotted out and is then never followed up on.
Working with cinematographer Grégory Turbellier, Herbulot throws all manner of frantic, kinetic motion at the screen; there’s plenty of antecedent for this sort of thing, and at times Zero seems to be trying to channel the hyper-fast visual grammar of Michael Bay, Tony Scott, or even Neveldine/Taylor. But Zero is no Crank, as the pacing is too herky-jerky and the action too sparse to really get the blood pumping. There are at least a few grace notes to be found, including one explosion that is observed only obliquely via shots of sand and silt vibrating in slow motion, as a couple of bodies fly through the sky as if gliding. There’s also a memorable fight between One, Two, and a mystery man named Daniel (Gary Dourdan) that suggests the more traditional action film that this could have been. Alas, the characters by and large remain mostly unappealing, and while their symbolic purpose — the ugly American tearing ass through Africa and destabilizing the area — remains politically trenchant, the project as a whole is ultimately as underdeveloped as everything else in the film. Zero quite simply feels like a rough draft, an occasionally diverting but ultimately empty odyssey that makes the grim mistake of confusing frenetic motion for thrilling momentum.
DIRECTOR: Jean Luc Herbulot; CAST: ddd; DISTRIBUTOR: Well Go USA; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: April 11; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 23 min.
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