User reviews

While 'Forces Spéciales' has some shortcomings, I have to say I enjoyed watching it. Sure the team doesn't always look up to the task, a few actors may not be too convincing either (although most are) and one may wonder about the tactics used in the film.

What I liked about this movie was that the crew and cast went to Tajikistan to shoot the Afghanistan and Pakistan scenes which makes the whole story more realistic – American productions would usually settle for Morocco or Jordania but the scenery is not quite the same. Another quality in 'Forces Spéciales' is the storyline which is kept simple, there is not subplot or complicated background: A French reporter is kidnapped by the Talibans, a team of team of soldiers is sent to rescue her. Also, languages have not been unified into English, something Hollywood still has problems with regularly.

'Forces Spéciales' might not be the best action movie ever (I am not sure this is what it's supposed to be anyways) but it has nothing to be ashamed of in comparison to 'Act of Valor' which was a big disappointment for me.

Starts as the expected showy advertising for French armed forces (I love the genre but I understand it may not be everybody's cup of tea), then masquerades as some attempt at a lame military action storyline... And then before you know it you find yourself emotionally pulled into a story that provides its share of insights into the contemporary meaning of being a professional soldier. Obviously heavy support from the French armed forces to the production enables the attention to detail that provides credible full immersion into the environment through many vignettes. Stunning landscapes make that even better. Sure, a couple of tactical choices and implausible coincidences pivotal to the story look like concessions to the necessities of a Hollywood movie scenario... But I'll gladly forgive that - and the use of music too : the temptations of becoming a documentary or a caricature have been resisted after all, and what's left is an engaging survival story that will catch an audience far wider than the military niche.

In the intro a French special forces team is in Kosovo to get a notorious war criminal. Unlike a US mission that would send maybe 1 chopper and 3 or 4 guys, the French send 5 or 6 choppers and countless guys. For some reason all these choppers don't seem to get noticed by the bad guys. Of course our team gets the guy no problem.

Next in Afghanistan, a French reporter interviews an Afghan girl. She's interviewed her before. The girl tells her the story of how she was sold into marriage. Her husband--the big bad local Taliban leader. I guess the Taliban discover that the girl is spilling her guts and when she leaves she's grabbed by dozens of Taliban. Our intrepid reporter decides she's going to rescue the girl with her two local helpers. Of course they immediately are grabbed as well and we meet the Taliban boss who wants her to to recite one of those confessions for the camera. She refuses and one of her helpers gets his throat slashed.

Back in Paris, the French government immediately launches a rescue mission--it's our team from the intro. The courageous French president of course doesn't think twice about agreeing to the risky mission to rescue a single reporter. When the team arrives in Pakistan where the captives are being held they witness the Taliban killing the Afghan girl. The team finds the reporter, Elsa, and her local assistant, Amen and rescue them. But the Taliban are on their tail. So they miss the rendezvous with the chopper and are on their own now with hordes of Taliban chasing them.

Several firefights and injuries ensue. The team leader decides they will walk to Pakistan!?! Crossing the Hindu Kush mountain range no less!?! Before the border they stop at a village. But soon the Taliban arrive. Amen decides to stay back because he knows the Taliban will wipe out the villagers. So Elsa also decides to help Amen and that forces the entire team to become "humanitarians" as the team leader complaints. Eventually they leave for the snowy mountains and everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. Of course there will be a final confrontation with the Taliban leader.

Special Forces is a rather odd French action survival drama propaganda movie. Odd because the action is realistic and great, but then the story is so unbelievable and the heroics so forced and some of the behaviors so nonsensical. We learn very little about our team. At some point before the Afghan mission they are at a party and one of them is presented as a main character, but he's also one of the less likable guys. The team is a strange mishmash of people, most of which don't look the part. The more interesting character is that of the young sniper. Initially, he's got issues killing people it seems, but what choice does he have. I guess French snipers work in solitary not as a team, so he's always off by himself to flank the bad guys.

Now, is it fair to ask for realism from a propaganda film? And as far as I could tell from the end credits there was some French government involvement aside from the usual financing. The way this movie was filmed you almost expect them to tell you that it was inspired by real events. And the movie does go beyond just presenting Western heroics versus the evil guys. The Taliban leader does get to complain about Western imposition of democracy at gun point. He does seek consultation with some higher ups and he's made to appear like a loose cannon. Our team also avoids stating political opinions but leave that to the politicians. The movie portrays the Western armed forces' habit of witnessing horrors and not intervening. Then it does a nice job of showing the Afghan village tradition of giving hospitality to all who ask for it, whether friend or foe.

It's a bit surprising that this movie precedes the American war propaganda films and unlike these, it's not afraid to harm its characters. Overall, Special Forces has strong first and second acts. But these are short. The long final act/journey gets tedious.

I couldn't be bothered to look if this is based on a true story. Nor will I compare this to heroism as seen in American movies of similar genre fair. But I can tell you that with all it's faults and flaws (and there are quite a few), this still manages to grip you, if you have a good surround sound system and a neat television set. Of course that shouldn't be the argument to rate a movie (Bruckheimer would be happy though), but the action is well choreographed, you always know where you are and the actors are not too bad either.

Having said that, I do understand if you feel like you've been cheated when you watch the movie. But don't start asking yourself, why this, why that, it'll spoil your movie experience. And after all, this is just a movie, so don't start comparing it to the real thing! If you do, it'll fail on a major scale!

In Afghanistan, the French journalist Elsa (Diane Kruger) and her colleague Amen (Mehdi Nebbou) are covering the story of Maina (Morjana Alaoui), a woman that was sold to a man when she was a child. The Taliban leader Ahmed Zaief (Raz Degan) abducts Elsa and Amen and tries to force her to read a message to the Western governments.

The Frech president sends six Special Force men to rescue Elsa that his hidden in a fortress in Pakistan. The team composed by Commander Kovax (Djimon Hounsou), Tic-Tac (Benoît Magimel), Lucas (Denis Ménochet), the sniper Elias (Raphaël Personnaz), Victor (Alain Figlarz) and Marius (Alain Alivon) release Elsa and Amen from their imprisonment but they lose their radios. Now the group needs to cross the inhospitable land to save their lives with the Taliban chasing them.

"Forces Spéciales" is one of the best and most underrated action movies I have recently seen. The talented Diane Kruger is one of the most (if not the most) beautiful contemporary actresses and has an awesome performance in the role of a French journalist kidnapped by the Taliban.

The action scenes are excellent, with great choreography and it is funny to read reviews telling that they are unrealistic as if it was a documentary and not an action film. The film is engaging from the beginning to the last scene in the end of the credits and like in most European films, the cast speaks more than one language. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "Forças Especiais" ("Special Forces")

If you like war stories, if you like survival, if you like army movies...

Look no further.

This wonderful movie is about a group of 6 special forces, lost somewhere in the Middle East, without communications or vehicles.

They have to walk through the mountains to reach Afghanistan and their base.

The whole movie is not based on the travel, but it takes a big place.

This is an action and emotional film.

There are some good real action scenes and a lot of feelings during the long and hard travel.

Co-written and directed by Stephane Rybojad, this debut feature is impressive and remarkable considering the sheer logistics involved in having it filmed in Tajikistan passing off as Afghanistan and its tribal borders where the film was primarily set. Rybojad cut his teeth with countless of documentaries, some of which involved the French special forces, so to say that he brings a degree of realism to the film is an understatement, having first hand knowledge about the weapons and tactics, despite having to weave a fictional tale around it that will appeal to a broad audience.

With a host of rifle weaponry, high-tech equipment and decked to the nines by smaller arms to larger ones like the Super Puma choppers (amongst others) and boasting even an aircraft carrier, some may be quick to claim that the film is nothing but propaganda for the French armed forces. But that can be so far from the truth, because what Rybojad had done is to provide a tale about humanity both good and evil, and the dilemma that anyone entrusted with a life and death situation to deal with almost on a constant basis. With just gun battles alone one may be better off with a computer game, but the story here, no matter how standard and cliché at times it may seem, worked without attempting to do more than it's capable of, knowing its limits and sticking very much to its strengths, despite having its final act a little bit clunky and a pivotal scene that turned out to be quite unbelievable in terms of geography, but with narrative films there's always the element of chance and coincidence otherwise nothing would actually happen.

While it's not everyday that we get to see a French action film, and one based on a uniformed group at that (the last being the GIGN in the film The Assault, which is based on a factual, historical incident), and this one in some ways reminded me of the Hollywood film Tears of the Sun by Antoine Fuqua. Both films feature a group of special forces troopers being tasked with an extraction mission, only to come face to face with a numerically superior opposition, having to battle the enemy while protecting their mark, and having the latter female and strong willed and at times at loggerheads with the mission objective, influencing how the troopers will function as a unit and having to constantly review whether they should just follow orders, or go about on a wider humanitarian mission that doesn't betray the conscience.

There's no Bruce Willis here, but Djimon Hounsou takes the charge as the leader of a group of six men in total tasked with a reconnaissance mission at first to uncover the whereabouts of the kidnapped journalist Elsa (Diane Kruger), before having their mission immediately turned to one of extraction. It may seem like an open and shut, routine mission with highly skilled, trained and equipped men balancing the odds of being numerically disadvantage, if not for Michael Cooper and Stephane Rybojad's story throwing a spanner in the works by taking out all their communications equipment very early on, rendering a change in their LZ impossible, and being left to their own devices to escape from Elsa's Taliban captors who are fast closing in on them. The structure here may seem similar to Tears, but it doesn't come with any requisite twists and turns. In fact the enemy may well be the harsh terrain and sub zero temperatures the group has to battle against, and for those pampered by things blowing up in the first half of the film, this portion on may seem like an anti-climax, especially when the story seemed to lose its tight grip on the plot, and made concessions to allow for closure.

The introduction was what set the stage with a glimpse of how tight the Special Forces work, flying in with their choppers on a mission to capture a war criminal, and a number of set action pieces to whet the appetites of the action junkie from the actual rescue of Elsa and the protection of tribal villagers who had shown them hospitality. But ultimately the story never allows you to forget about each of the characters, giving each some very strong identifiers that you'll feel for them especially since Cooper and Rybojad shows no mercy if any were to slip up and be complacent, never in their intention to build supermen or a super team, even if early skirmishes may seem to suggest something like that. It is this avoidance of caricatures that makes you feel for the safety of everyone each time a shot rings out, and as weapons and ammunition become light, fuses a real sense of danger and fear. The villains however are plainly one-dimensional, even for the chief terrorist Zaief (Raz Degan), who has no lack of scenes to show why he's pure evil and is one to be gotten rid of.

Still, Special Forces ranks up there with the many films from around the world about specially trained men and women in uniform being called upon to put their lives at the forefront in the protection and well being of others, and you can either view this as a purely action flick, or a tribute to the spirit of the such groups, with a stark comment as explained by a character, that it's better to go in a blaze of glory, than to live a life of anonymity.

I am not going to watch this movie again. Why? Because there was few moments in the movie where it felt real. Although some of the actors like the female reporter did a good job of acting, the surroundings didn't seem to be following. The action part looked like any other with the bad guys falling like flies and the good guys standing exposed to the bullets and nothing hitting them. The bad guys resembled zombies and just walked towards the bullets to die as soon as they could. Whenever any of the good guys were hit, everybody cried and screamed like it was the end of the world and they had a lot of time mourning right in the middle of sustained shootings. But the bad guys didn't care dying and as mentioned fell like flies to the ground. The chase scene also didn't look real. While the heroes had to pass high altitude in extremely cold and snow storm, the bad guys suddenly appeared and surprised them. Unlike the heroes, they had little clothing and no sign of wear and exhaustion. This movie could be a lot better if the action scene were a bit more realistic and the bad guys had more character and looked smarter. Other stuff that I didn't like was the fact that these guys where not found although the military had hundreds of ways of finding them. They didn't search for them and these guys had nothing electronic to send a signal back to base although they had everything else imaginable like infinite number of bullets to shoot during their journey. Sometimes in the movie you could see that they had used ideas from other movies to make it more dramatic. You can of course watch this movie but don't be afraid to get disappointed.

You get what you pay for and - when compared to Black Hawk Down - the budget for this movie would get you an Oyster card for Zone 1-2 for a month. This isn't Hollywood dollars and it shows.

Some of the scenes are a tribute (or plagiarism) to the Ridley Scott masterpiece. There is a decent opening sequence and the acting is reasonable, but you just feel that you're being dragged into B-movie territory despite wanting it to work.

Weirdly, what really lets down the move is the music. Its all low-end production music and has nothing to do with the supposed location, making it harder to believe it was shot on location.

Had there been more zeros on the production bill, this could have been an eight but it'll need to be a low six I'm afraid.

While a tad overlong and light on character development, SPECIAL FORCES nevertheless delivers a fairly solid entry in the modern warfare genre. The plot is rather simple: a French special forces unit (the movie is French/French-produced) is sent in to rescue a journalist from Afghanistan who has been captured by a Taliban warlord. Right off the bat, you are introduced to the principal characters, but not much is given in the way of character development or making the audience care, aside from some small character moments interspersed throughout the latter half of the film. The performances are adequate, with the best being given by Diane Kruger (as the journalist) and Djimon Hounsou (one of the special forces guys). The actor who portrays the Taliban warlord also does a good job, probably adding some depth to his character by having him be Western-educated and somewhat caught between Western culture and his own culture and beliefs, but not much attention is paid to his character either. It also doesn't help that his demise later in the film is done so haphazardly and unceremoniously. As far as the combat sequences go, they were fine and done in current "en vogue" style of somewhat shaky "cinema verite" realism to give a sense of the chaos of battle. The violence was effective and not gratuitous in any way. However, towards the end the movie drags a little bit as we're shown day after day passing of the core group trying to get away from their pursuers and safely back into Afghanistan (they've been wandering around in the Pakistani desert for most of the movie). Overall, the movie is effective in the combat sequences and showing how the special forces team bond with the people they try to rescue. Over the course of the film, you do grow to care a little bit more about the characters but not because you feel like you really know them, just because you empathize with the sticky situation they're in. The movie aspires to be SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (made by the French, and set during the Afghan war), but it falls short of the mark. Still, it makes for a somewhat entertaining, slightly taxing, viewing experience.

This is a very good film. A pulsating action film from start to finish. If you liked Lone Survivor you will like this.

Forces Speciales tells the story of the French Special Forces and their mission, in this instance, to save journalists who have been kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan and taken to the tribal areas of Pakistan. The covert operation develops complications and the sole lure of the movie is to discover whether the mission will succeed or fail; will they live or die.

As one reviewer notes, the movie is nearly a commercial for the French Special Forces, and the plot of the movie, what there is of it, involves a kill-crazed Al Qaeda leader and his nameless and near-faceless band of zombie-like henchmen who relentlessly pursue their victims. Whoever gets in the way of this insane band of thugs, Afghan, Pakistan, foreign soldier or whatever, they seem to crave killing them quickly. And, the supply of these killers seems limitless, offering the viewer ample opportunities to watch them machine-gunned down in large numbers by the heroes, including a few scenes that include an accompanying heavy-metal music soundtrack.

Yes we see the heroism, self-sacrifice and compassion of the gallant French warriors, along with the typical scenes of male-bonding. But much of this movie is standard fair for the genre, and a very one-dimensional look at the problems of this troubled area of the world. If you think that suits your taste, go for it! One last comment, when will we stop seeing overweight, gray-haired men portraying elite commandos? This is a young man's occupation. I'm surprised we didn't see Jean Reno as the commando leader, but that would have been even more difficult to believe.

Wow wow wow where to begin... I started this movie with the expectation that it was going to be just a campy B-Movie, with some cool action scenes and cheesy one liners (with a generic name like "Special Forces"). Little did I know I sat through 2 hours of the best choreographed, best acted, and most heart wrenching tale, I have seen in a long time. It is pretty much the French version of Sole Survivor. Djimon Hounsou strikes again as one of the best actors I have ever seen, I consider my self a "tough guy", but his emotional moments had me fighting back the tears. Another favorite character of mine was Raphaël Personnazs' character of the Rookie Elias. He was that guy we all want to be when we think of a hero. He always acts without regard to himself to save lives, and is torn apart seeing Innocent people killed, but the movie does a good job of showing that war is a terrible thing. Lastly as being someone whom served in Afghanistan, I can say the military choreography was spot on. The actors did an excellent job of of reenacting combat. This is a must see and I already ordered the Blue Ray off Amazon, because this is a must watch, and I want it in my movie library. 5 out of 5

I'm not a big fan of war flicks or movies about military but I can be drawn in if it's well written and suspenseful enough. One of my favourite TV shows was The Unit. I was worried this would be rubbish tho because so many in this genre are but it was actually pretty good. Sure there are some problems with believability but I don't expect movies to be "real" - only real enough to make it work. In fact I often find "realistic" movies boring as bat guano and wonder why they didn't just call it a documentary & be done with it. Anyway, back to the point. I think this is worth renting as long as you don't have too high expectations. It's fun, action packed, has it's drama and pathos, gives some great insight into the politics & life in that region and is sympathetic & intelligent in it's treatment of local people struggling under the rule of the Taliban. The main actors are mostly good, I particularly like the dude who is in charge of the rescue team. Good acting from him and Diane Kruger. Diane was so good she actually made me seriously dislike her character in the first half of the movie. I just thought the woman was a complete idiot who caused the death of a bunch of people unnecessarily. By the end of the movie tho I felt more kindly towards her. SO the point of this rambling review is, don't worry about the negative reviews. The movie has enough action, authenticity and good production/cinematography to get it past the down sides such as ridiculous behaviour of the "elite" forces & cheesy dialogue. LOVED the last scene (After the titles) so make sure you stick around for it.

Have fun and don't take stuff too seriously ;)