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Walker's Three to See: <i>Point Blank</i>

KCUR's Steve Walker shares his top movie picks of the week.By Steve Walker

Kansas City, MO – Imagine that 20 minutes into your work day, you're forced into a situation that results in a new profile: armed and dangerous. Such is the premise of Fred Cavaye's nifty crime thriller, Point Blank, - which adroitly pays homage to the classic Alfred Hitchcock theme of the ordinary man stretched to extraordinary measures. Gilles Lellouche plays Samuel, a nurse's aide and expectant father who has the misfortune of working a hospital wing in Paris where a criminal is recuperating from being hit by a motorcycle while being chased by two men packing heat. At breakneck speed, Samuel is suddenly the thug's aide-de-camp, desperately fighting to keep his pregnant kidnapped wife alive. If that sounds incredulous, it's handled here in a way that makes the narrative completely believable - and turns Samuel into a bona fide hero you really want to root for. The movie's stuffed with exciting twists and turns, not least among them a dazzling 20-minute sequence set in a police department office staffed with dirty cops and embroiled in unmitigated chaos. And there's a killing set to Renee Fleming singing an aria on t.v. At only 80 minutes, the film is like a Bourne movie injected with adrenaline - and if that sounds redundant, consider that a shot of adrenaline figures in the plot.

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