The Alzheimer Case (De Zaak Alzheimer)

The Alzheimer Case (De Zaak Alzheimer) (Belgium, dir­ector Erik Van Looy): Although based on a novel, this stylish police thriller’s main con­ceit (”hitman has Alzheimer’s”) could have been lifted from a Hollywood film executive’s idea of “high concept”. Except that it would have made a for­get­table Hollywood pic­ture. Instead, dir­ector Van Looy sets this story in his native Belgium. Police detect­ives Vincke and Verstuyft are like a modern day Starsky and Hutch, without the bad hair­cuts. Who knew that Antwerp even had police, never mind such cool ones? Their job is to track down the man who’s killed sev­eral high-profile politi­cians and a young child prostitute.

Reminding me a lot of Terence Stamp in The Limey, vet­eran actor Jan Decleir por­trays aging hitman Angelo Ledda, whose refusal to kill the young girl leads him to seek revenge on the people who want her dead. His deteri­or­a­tion is a cause for sym­pathy as well as a plot device. He must com­plete his “mis­sion” before he for­gets his reasons for car­rying it out. He also plays a cat and mouse game with the police who are trying to solve the killings, staying one step ahead until he can no longer think clearly.

Van Looy admitted his fond­ness for “police thrillers with a soul” and espe­cially for the work of Michael Mann, and the influ­ence of Mann is every­where. If you like Mann, you’ll like this film. Well-developed char­ac­ters, moody cine­ma­to­graphy and fine acting didn’t com­pletely save this film, though. I thought the plot was a little too straight­for­ward, and the film itself was about 20 minutes too long, with a couple of false end­ings that could have been re-cut. I think I would have given a shorter ver­sion of this film an 8, but even if it was a slightly deriv­ative cop film, it was a slightly deriv­ative cop film in Flemish!

Note: The film even­tu­ally got a North American release under the new title The Memory of a Killer so you may want to look for it under that title at your local DVD shop.

Official site of the film: ms.skynet.be/alzheimer

(7/10)

Tagged as: belgium