听 User Rating 
Five years on, writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz has yet to live up to the promise of "La Haine", his startling portrait of Parisian youth. Despite being reunited with that film's charismatic star Vincent Cassel, this grisly policier will do little to salvage his reputation.
The distributor's original plan was to release the film in a dubbed version, with Cassel and co-star Jean Reno voicing their characters in English. That decision has wisely been reversed, but even with subtitles this is a preposterous drama that falls well short of the Hollywood thrillers it slavishly emulates.
Respected criminologist Pierre Niemans (Reno) travels to a university town in the Alps where the mutilated corpse of a staff member has been found strangled. With the help of a beautiful young mountaineer (Fares), he realises the murder is just one of a string of slaughters carried out by a deranged serial killer.
In a neighbouring town, cocky police lieutenant Max Kerkerian (Cassel) is investigating the desecration of a tomb containing the remains of a ten-year-old girl who died 20 years before. After various adventures, discoveries, and fisticuffs, it transpires that Niemans and Kerkerian are working on the same case from opposite ends.
Despite a spectacular Alpine finale that contains some stunning "Cliffhanger"-style effects, it's hard to take "The Crimson Rivers" seriously. Cassel (who broke his nose while filming a fight sequence) has a certain boyish charm, while Reno is always watchable. But both should have thought twice before agreeing to appear in this gutless "Se7en" rip-off.
