I must be mentally exhausted to enjoy the action and gratuitous violence of CERITO Films as an intellectual break. I said ‘enjoy,’ meaning that I liked it. Why empathise with Jordan, a pariah of justice who dispenses justice with injustice? Perhaps because of his double recklessness. The first, after all — and in this he set an example for Tom Cruise — Belmondo does his own action scenes at the age of 50. Isn’t that admirable, considering that he chases a young man 20 years his junior for half a kilometre, gets run over and jumps onto a yacht from a moving helicopter, simply for the bloody purpose of dealing a blow to the Marseille Cartel, that is, ending the chase by throwing 200 kg of heroin into the sea?

But secondly, and no less commendable, the poses of Belmondo, the actor who doesn’t use stuntmen, are diabolically fused with those of the police commissioner, with his iron duty as a samurai or Robin Hood, with his own ambiguous ethical rules, risking his life in the red-light district of Rue de Lyon to rescue Tonton’s daughter, the prostitute Catherine Seritti, just to find out the whereabouts of Alfred the Chemist. After chasing the head of the Marseille Cartel like a madman, breaking every law necessary to justify the greater prize of capturing Meccacci, Jordan is demoted and sent to the provinces as punishment for his indiscipline. He had already been threatened with being sent to the bureaucratic city of Châteauroux. It is a fact, he is sent into exile to the provinces, where he encounters the same police mafia associated with Meccacci. With the exception of Detective Rojinski, who supports the rebellious commissioner as much as he can, the system is against him because of its corruption. Adam Smith The viewer might approve of Jordan’s violent actions if they empathise with his indignation at the corruption, even if his methods are illegal. In ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ (1759). In Chapter 1, ‘On Sympathy,’ Smith points out that we judge the feelings of others as ‘just’ when they coincide with our own, even in antisocial contexts. Rojinski tries to support him and they go to a raid with Madame Kemal in Cité Bergére, who works for Meccacci, regarding the trafficking of some Turks from Selim Bey involved in shady business. It took Jordan and Rojinski longer to arrest them than to be released thanks to their immediate boss. Jordan is called by a criminal he locked up a long time ago named Tonton.

Tonton asks him to save his daughter Catherine from drugs and a life of crime, and reveals the whereabouts of Alfred E, a chemist who worked with Meccacci until he escaped, repudiated by the Capo for his homosexual tendencies. Jordan does so. He enters the dangerous Rue du Lyon and, after a beating and wounding a drug dealer or pimp with a shotgun, he succeeds and gets the address. But finding Alfred does not guarantee that he will catch Meccacci, because El Químico has asked him for 100,000 to make a life with his young lover. It’s a shame because he gets the money from another crook, but Alfred will never enjoy his plans because he is killed at the train station. Jordan becomes emotionally involved with the prostitute.

The capo’s men kill Francis, a character who appears only briefly but is supposed to have been Jordan’s friend for a long time and now runs a video game machine business set up by Meccacci for him to launder his money. At one point, Francis dies defending the shop, and the plot does not hide the extreme violence with which Jordan pursues and crashes the killers of Francis to death. Another section of the film is when the Tourian brothers beat up Livia, the prostitute Jordan started dating. He immediately went to the casino and billiard hall, followed them to where they were having dinner, and in a ridiculous sequence, pretending at first to accidentally spill spaghetti on one of them, he ends up beating them up and headbutting one, smearing hot spaghetti alla puttanesca all over the other’s face. With his revenge complete, he was able to return peacefully to continue pursuing Meccacci until Baldi is sent by the Capo to lure Jordan into an ambush.

At one point, Baldi stops, arguing that he will see Meccacci personally, but Jordan anticipates him, handcuffs Baldi to the steering wheel and takes the automatic weapon from the glove compartment, putting on a glove and getting out of the car. He only had to wait a few minutes and another car arrived to empty its lead, thinking that Joran was there and not Baldi. Jordan shot at the assassin’s car and killed both men. Finally, knowing that Mecacci would return with another legal trick to get out of paying for his drug trafficking and murders, Jordan defends himself when he shoots him and finally kills him. I can recommend this film if you are looking for action and personal vendettas galore.