4L

Jean-Pierre (Jean Reno) and Tocho (Hovik Keuchkerian) get word that their old friend Joseba is dying in Timbuktu and decide to see him. Joseba's daughter Ely reluctantly comes along, but insists they take the little French rally car her father rebuilt before he abandoned her. So instead of just flying there, they drive from Morocco across the desert, running into several problems.

It was an interesting movie, just for the variety of situations they run into in their travels. Drug runners, border crossings, Tuaregs (lugging along a satellite he found in the desert), a guy with one of those land sailboat things. Those things look so damn cool, but I would be absolutely terrified to use one, since you really need a big open place like the desert to use them, and that seems like a bad place to be when things go wrong. An impression this movie confirms in fact, as Jean-Pierre falls ill partway through. Plus, the car keeps breaking down in various ways. The constant arrival of a new setting or problem keeps the film interesting, especially as they start to compound. You can't ever get entirely comfortable because it's unclear what's coming next.

Watching Tocho gradually prove to be the reliable of the two adults is interesting. Initially it seems as though he's made the trip only because he's thoroughly sick of his current life and it's an excuse to abandon it. Actually, I thought he was going to commit suicide in the first five minutes when he threw his uniform in the trash outside his apart, then washed down some pills with booze. I guess they weren't that kind of pills. Jean-Pierre's got a winery, seems like he has his stuff reasonably together, but the farther they go, the more he proves to be a problem, or just plain useless, and the more Tocho has to figure out how to pull everyone through.

They pick up a hitchhiker partway through, a young man named Mamadou trying to make it back home Mali and his family. His fate didn't seem necessary, but I guess the film didn't want to end entirely happily. Sucks he drew the short straw though. My money had been on Jean-Pierre dying of dysentery or whatever he came down with.

I kept expecting to find out Mamadou's story wasn't what he said it was, especially after one conversation where he's conversing with a Tuareg on one side and Ely on the other, and telling them the other is saying something entirely different from the truth. Although Jean-Pierre did the same thing at the checkpoint into the desert. But with Jean-Pierre I couldn't decide if he thought it was better to lie to Tocho and Ely (he's French, they're Spanish), or if he was just an idiot and couldn't entirely understand what the commander of the checkpoint was telling him.