22 Bullets

Charly Matteï has left the criminal world and built a quiet life in Marseille with his wife and two children. One morning a team of eight ambushes him in a car park, kills his dog and leaves him for dead with twenty-two bullets in him. He does not die. Out of hospital, he finds the men who pulled the triggers one by one. Richard Berry directed. Jean Reno plays Charly, with Kad Merad, Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Marina Foïs in the cast. The source is Franz-Olivier Giesbert's 2007 novel L'Immortel. The story comes from a real man. In Marseille, Jacques Imbert, known as Jacky le Mat, was ambushed on 1 February 1977 and hit twenty-two times: seven bullets of 11.43 calibre and fifteen pellets. He survived. Over the following six months eleven men suspected of setting it up were executed. Imbert was never charged with any of it. Who it is for: viewers who like French crime films and revenge stories. Who it is not for: anyone looking for moral complexity. The film does not question its protagonist and presents the violence as an account fairly settled.