Largo Winch (Jérôme Salle, 2008)

It's a risky venture for an action film to aim for emotional resonance, and the Daniel Craig Bond reboot franchise seems to have given up on the attempt just two films in, settling for duelling with the Michael Bay juggernaut in the skid-bang-wallop stakes instead, falling between two stools and thoroughly mangling its assets in the process. But the first Bourne film managed it, so the golden formula must exist...
The ludicrously-monikered Largo Winch is the hero of a long-running series of bande dessinée, a medium which has bafflingly broad popularity across the adult Francophone world, unmatched anywhere else, barring Japan, regardless of  any 'graphic novel'-rebranding attempts. This tells you what to expect: glossy violence, with affectations towards back stories and concerns with character psyches. This is, of course, pretty much what Bond adds up to, and large parts of the film are a smudged carbon copy of a Bond, right down to the soundtrack, with vulpinely smirking male model with sticky-up rebel hair Tomer Sisley scampering his way to gaining control of the multi-national bequeathed to him by his late adoptive father whilst Kristin Scott-Thomas and assorted mafia machinate away against his rise.
You might see the fairly sparing use of action, as far the genre goes, as a sign of a mature hand at the helm, but bear in mind that for the target audience this is the 'origin' part, getting the necessary evil of exposition out of the way to let the inevitable sequels run amok. As it is, the action actually provides some relief from the hackneyed back story, if only by virtue of at least being efficiently handled.

4/10