Franck Gastambide inThe Wages of FearNetflix / Netflix
It might come as a surprise that there ’s a new translation ofThe Wages of Fearstreaming onNetflixright now . With the precaution of a equipment driver hale explosive across a stretch of jolty road , this French remake of a French classic sputtered onto the platform . promotional material has been minimal , and you have to go look for the movie to find it on the homepage , where it sits several thumbnail late on the “ New Releases ” luggage carrousel . As of this writing , there are no recap on Rotten Tomatoes … mostly because Netflix did n’t make the film available in advance . If a truck explodes in the desert and there ’s no one around to stream that blowup to their twist , does it make a sound ?
honestly , a silent tone ending is likely the right move for this particular international acquisition . Not since the much - maligned Netflix remaking ofRebecca — a novel previously adjust by Alfred Hitchcock — has a milepost of suspense been so ruinously upgraded for the twenty-first century . Directed and co - save by Julien Leclercq , the newWagestransports its tense scenario from the midcentury South America of Henri - Georges Clouzot ’s 1953 original to a more contemporary and arid backdrop . The most significant alteration , however , have less to do with setting than the nature of the ordeal the film chronicles . One of the most boldness - wracking musical style premises ever has been pointlessly amped up : more gunplay , more characters , more romance and heroism .
Franck Gastambide inThe Wages of FearNetflix / Netflix
As originally think by novelist Georges Arnaud , that premiss is a model of nightmare minimalism , easy communicated via logline : A radical of economically despairing men embark on a probable felo-de-se mission , hauling two trucks full of unstably stored , highly volatile trinitroglycerin across hundreds of miles of inconsistently paved terrain . There ’s a big payday waiting for them on the other side , but will they live to collect ? rack up the wrong bump along the manner , and the cargo goes stunningly up in flames .
Even if you ’ve never personally blanched - knuckled your way throughThe Wages of Fear(the first picture or its out - of - print germ stuff ) , you ’ve probably feel its aftershock . WhenKeanu Reevesclimbed aboard a charabanc that could n’t slow down in the 1994 action mechanism triumphSpeed , he was steering down a road Clouzot pave four decades earlier . There ’s a little ofWagesin theMission : Impossible dealership , with its escalating gauntlets of blink - and - die danger . AndChristopher Nolancited the picture show as an influence on hisDunkirk , another suspense gadget that subject frazzled gentleman’s gentleman to a shaky melting pot .
And of courseWageshas been remade before . The last prescribed thrust at revive its ravishment on the face was 1977 ’s deceptively titledSorcerer , a costly Hollywood bust aim by the late William Friedkin . Though the director made his own tweaks to the story — moving it into a then - modern world of terrorist attack and ruthless crude oil conglomerates — he preserved its simplicity . Four men . Two hand truck . A dangerously detonatable cargo . Potential expiry around every bend .
The firstWagesis still the idealistic discussion of Arnaud ’s ingenious , anxiety - cause game . After a perhaps overly extend first bit – a problem , the true be told , with all the adaptations , thoughSorcererhandles the frame-up with more hypnotic vogue — Clouzot gets his anti - heroes behind the wheel and commence tightening the lugsail en . The obstacle face up the human being are myriad . Drive too slow over the more coarse-textured stretchiness of route , and the hand truck might careen too much and jostle the payload . Drive too fast , and you might lose restraint on a turn , and the volatile result is the same . Even the propinquity of the two trucks to each other becomes a source of likely calamity ; without the right distance between the two , a one - lane road can easily become a collision form .
Clouzot hard - wires his consultation to the nagging , expanding emphasis of his character . We ’re strapped right in there with them , feeling every inconvenient bump , wary of every forthcoming obstruction posed by the landscape painting . It ’s maybe the most real demonstration ever ofHitchcock ’s account of suspenseas a bomb under the mesa thatdoesn’texplode . ( Not for nothing was Clouzot often relate to as the French Hitchcock ; he ’s even said to have rushed to assure the right field to Arnaud ’s book out of veneration that the Master of Suspense might get to them first.)Wagesis such a perfect instrument of anxiety that it ’s in reality rather surprising that there have n’t been evenmoreattempts to do it again .
Maybe most have had the good sense not to try . Or perhaps the commercial underperformance ofSorcerer , roundly ignore by the public in the summer ofStar Wars , produce the diesel mephitis of madness around the idea . Friedkin ’s moving picture has been gratefully reclaimed in recent years , recognized as a rough - and - spill classic in its own right field . Though it may have garnish some of the complications Clouzot finely exploited , it rationalise its existence via the purephysicalityof the filmmaking . Friedkin pass those trucks a unholy center of gravity , cook us sense their monstrous system of weights . The movie ’s most famous succession is a deranged practical stunt in which the director guided a real gas - guzzler over the most rickety span in all of South America — a spectacle of rash perseverance on the part of the characters and film producer alike .
There ’s nothing remotely as queasy - exciting in the newWages . The best that can be said for the film is that it ’s competently shop . But in retooling Arnaud ’s timeless conceit for a newfangled hearing and era , Leclercq transmute it into something more generically diverting . Rather than hard - edge , mismatched outlaws , link only through a mutual dearth of option , the main characters are a dyad of giving brothers ( Franck Gastambide and Alban Lenoir ) mending their break relationship after a robbery gone wrong . That ’s the melodramatic fuel of their 500 - mile pilgrim’s journey , which plays less like an existential death trip — like an obstacle class of day of reckoning — than one of the streamlined , international heist thriller that have become Netflix bread and butter .
Worse still , thisWagesdistrusts the gut - wrenching power of its borrowed premiss . Past adaptation suggest that every in crossed on the road to delivery and deliverance could lead to fiery destruction , but Leclercq ’s characters barrel along with blithe impassiveness to the liquid dynamite in the preview . And that ’s because the film queer their farsighted private road into a series of mellow - speed chase and action - picture skirmishes , as bad guy put bullets in the trucks without beam them sky mellow . At one point , one of the brothers ends up standing on a landmine , and you have to wonder : Why did the photographic film have to infix a new form of volatile gimmick when the very payload they ’re hold is a variable dud itself ? The result is that thisWagescan’t wait to get out of the truck . It has n’t the solitaire for the game it ’s recreate .
You do n’t need faceless thug or backstabbing comrades or even the check clock ( “ You have 24 time of day , ” someone basically intones ) that Leclercq introduce here . The Wages of Fear , as it was written and first translate to the filmdom , is more elemental than all that . The enemies of the fib are gravity and topography and speed and earth itself . To try and call on such a fatalist thriller into something more fast and furious — all over with shootouts and blatantly fake CGI detonation — is to misunderstand its entreaty .
In its honest form , The Wages of Fearis an impeccably raw suspense contraption . It take a crap the very number of displace forward into a life - and - demise proposition . It conduct noir to its logical endpoint , with characters so screwed by their bad decision and bad luck that one false crook could stop it all for them . And in its portrait of adult male cornered into take the worst job out there , it ’s an enduring parable of throttle capitalist economy — an element mostly defused by the more apolitical fresh version . You ’d reckon a premise as strong asThe Wages of Fearwould be punishing to screw up . But in the cyclosis age , there ’s a bomb waiting around every recession and in every “ Recommended For You ” waiting line .
