France · 2002
Rated R · 1h 56m
Director Manuel Boursinhac
Starring Samy Naceri, Samuel Le Bihan, Clotilde Courau, Michel Duchaussoy
Genre Drama, Action, Thriller
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Dris is an ex-con, living in the borderline between a decent and a criminal life. He has a regular and simple work and lives a simple life with his wife Lise and loves his family. However, his childhood friends from his Arab community, including his best friend Yanis, are mobsters and his brother is a small time delinquent. Yanis tries to bring Dris back to his gang, and uses his former lover Nina to seduce him, taking him to expensive places to feel the importance of big money. Dris fights against the temptation, but an event will route him back to Yanis' gang and in a fight between gangs with tragic consequences for the whole community.
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While Melville's films strike a pose of ironic bloodlessness, The Code attends to a thick stew of (soap-) operatic emotion, turning each internecine skirmish into an occasion for melodramatic brooding. Melville once described his films as comedies; The Code, unfortunately, knows no such wit.
The New York Times by Dave Kehr
Probably should have stayed on a shelf back in Paris.
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
Choose to pass this one up.
If the plot comes off more like a reworking of Scorsese’s tales of Italian-American mobsters, Boursinhac nevertheless shows a sure hand with his story, lingering on the handsome, lost face of Dris as his world falls apart around him.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
The atmospheric, richly detailed La Mentale has terrific vitality with its volatile mixture of alternating camaraderie and savagery.
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
Doesn't have much time for refinement of image or elegance of plot. What it's got instead is an insider's feel for the local, excitable hoodlum life and speech.
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
Boursinhac and Bibi Naceri throw all the usual elements into the pot: Economic inequality, ethnic tensions, feverish family ties and the titular criminal code, which everyone invokes and everyone agrees is a load of claptrap.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by Peter Rainer
It might seem as though there is nothing new to be done with the crime thriller, but The Code (La Mentale), directed by Manuel Boursinhac and written by Bibi Naceri, provides a new twist.
The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden
Although it offers no new angles on the story engines of loyalty and revenge, the French film boasts an intriguing milieu and the off-center, hair-trigger intensity of Samy Naceri as a crime boss.
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