Par­ti­san

It’s been far too long since Vin­cent Cas­sel has been in a great movie. Fur­ther­more, it’s been far too long since Vin­cent Cas­sel has been great in a bad movie. In Ariel Kleiman’s under­whelm­ing Par­ti­san, he’s good, but not great as the charis­mat­ic Gre­gori, the Jim Jones-like leader of a curi­ous sect in which he is the only adult male.

To his cohorts he is a benign dic­ta­tor, per­son­al­ly nur­tur­ing chil­dren from birth, school­ing them, feed­ing them and also turn­ing them into gun-tot­ing sol­diers. Kleiman and co-writer Sarah Cyn­gler leave blanks to be filled in by the imag­i­na­tion, such as the polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion out­side of this stone com­pound, whether Gre­gori is father to these chil­dren, and why the kids are reg­u­lar­ly sent out on dirt­bikes to assas­si­nate appar­ent­ly ran­dom local men.

The sto­ry is told from the per­spec­tive of Jere­my Chabriel’s Alexan­der, a meek but devot­ed mini-mer­ce­nary who is start­ing to spot some of the philo­soph­i­cal incon­sis­ten­cies in his leader’s cheer­i­ly fascis­tic world­view. Despite sel­dom los­ing his tem­per or being drawn to vio­lence, Gregori’s fas­tid­i­ous rule stops the deviants in their stride with a sim­ple pun­ish­ment and reward sys­tem. It’s com­mend­able the way that Kleiman quick­ly immers­es the view­er into this world with just a few sim­ple, sub­tle strokes, but it’s almost as if he doesn’t know where to go from there.

Chabriel makes for a bland, inex­pres­sive lead – there’s just noth­ing behind those pierc­ing light blue eyes to make us yearn for him to suc­ceed. Alexander’s slow real­i­sa­tion that he’s locked inside a night­mare is trig­gered by a series of elab­o­rate­ly phoney sit­u­a­tions, while Gre­gori tries to keep his flock in line with tedious moral lessons which sore­ly lack cred­i­bil­i­ty. There’s lit­tle inter­est in flesh­ing out any of the side play­ers, their cyn­i­cal, drone-like obe­di­ence only help­ing to empha­sise Alexan­der as our dullard hero.