The Beats That This Movie Skipped

A Prophet

**1/2 out of ****

Directed by: Jacques Audiard

Starring: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif and Hichem Yacoubi

Running time: 155 minutes

Many crime sagas end with our criminal being put behind bars, but that’s where the first reel of A Prophet, an Oscar-nominated gangster thriller from France, begins.

Our protagonist's name is Malik El Djebena and he’s portrayed with quiet ferocity by Tahar Rahim.

Malik is in prison for six years. He is illiterate and almost invisible to the tough, meat-headed criminals – a gang of locked up Corsicans led by the frightening, ruthless Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup) – who control the joint.

The key word in that last sentence was “almost.” As Malik is in a separate cell block (the one that houses the Arab prisoners), Cesar wants an extension in that wing. He tells Malik to murder an inmate.

And so begins his rise as Cesar’s henchman in a dismal, blood-festering prison.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, A Prophet takes a stab at offering a contemporary spin on the sprawling crime thrillers popularized by The Godfather and that permeate through much of Scorsese’s filmography.

The performances are powerful and the direction is astute, but A Prophet is never as absorbing as it wants to be. Malik’s rise to prominence as Cesar’s confidante is steady and sustains our attention through a two-and-a-half hour running time, but the character and his descent into a criminal world never get under our skin.

The fault is not of Jacques Audiard, the film’s director. He clips the plot forward without hyper editing and refrains from being over-aggressive with the religious undertones that the title alludes to.

He instills a hushed but gritty atmosphere into the claustrophobic prison settings, and then clears up the image and moves about more freely when the action shifts outside (Malik is arranged throughout the film to go on missions, as Cesar’s representative, beyond the cell walls).

The fault also does not lie within the performances, which are frighteningly good, especially Arestrup’s as the Corsican crime leader. Arestrup has a furious bite and a blistering stare, but he never lets the character descend into an overcooked figurehead cliché.

No, the film’s biggest crime is its lack of character.

Malik is an overly ambiguous case. We follow this character through situations with touch-to-stomach violence and where he must summon intelligent and perceptive decision-making to survive. But we don't learn much about him, only receiving smidgens of his backstory or of his personal motives.

With a figure as morally gray and characteristically ambiguous as Malik, can one expect to be engaged in his journey without any emotional tie to hook onto?

Even with its punchy violence and intricate approach to the crime genre, this is a drab and empty character study. A Prophet may have elements of greatness within it, but it comes up short where it counts: the protagonist. Who could have prophesied that?