It all starts with a chase. And the chase barely stops until the credits start rolling. Fred Cavayé’s Point Blank doesn’t trade in much subtextual complexity or emotional depth. What it does do is provide a breathless succession of well executed and expertly crafted thrills. It’s hardly high art, but it’s not really trashy, either; this is what a movie like Taken might be, if you deleted “guilty” from its designation as a pleasure.

That chase at the beginning is started in its midst, without context. One man, Sartet (Roschdy Zem) already has a gunshot wound to the gut, and is chased by two gun-toting thugs — until he gets hit by a car in a traffic tunnel. The pursuers are forced to back off as a crowd gathers, and Sartet lands in the hospital, where Samuel (Gilles Lellouche), a nurse’s aide, saves him from another attempt on his life. Samuel is a gentle family man, whose wife Nadia (Elena Anaya) is just weeks away from delivering their first child. Unfortunately, when he steps in to save Sartet, he becomes involved in a web of cops, crooks, and the sometimes blurry line between the two. His wife is kidnapped and he’s given three hours to get Sartet out of the hospital if he wants to see her again and become a father.

The details of who has done what to whom, which criminal factions are playing this situation against one another, which factions within the police department are manipulating things for their own benefit, are slowly revealed as the movie rushes forward. The number of twists, double-crosses, bait-and-switches, and shifting notions of who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy (and even what that means within the movie’s context) might be gimmicky if not for the fact that they always remain in service of the relentless motion of the chase. Even who’s doing the chasing and who’s pursued changes from time to time, but at a brisk and economical 84 minutes, none of this has time to grow tiresome.

The success or failure of a film like this is based in large part on the director’s ability to keep the tension stretched taut and to occasionally take his foot off the gas enough to give the viewer a slight beather in between the heart-pounding set pieces. Cavayé toes the line of excess, but always knows just when to pull back ever so briefly to allow a little extra information into the narrative and provide a demarcation between periods of action. He also knows how to really go for that excess when warranted: the film’s foot chase through the Paris metro tunnels takes brilliant advantage of the modern obsession with surveillance, the pursuing police officers constantly losing the trail only to pick it back up again as they’re fed information from cops watching security monitors. The technique extends the chase far beyond where it would have ended in most movies, and results in one of the most heart-pounding Paris chase scenes since the classic motorcycle-in-the-subway sequence in 1981’s Diva.

The actors all do justice to the genre conventions they’re playing: Lellouche as the beleagured everyman thrown into an extraordinary circumstance, Anaya as the damsel in distress, Zem as the mysterious crook, and Gérard Lanvin as a gruff police Commandant. There’s an element of stereotype in all of them, but Point Blank revels in the fact that it’s a formula exercise, and employing that formula as perfectly as it can, so the stock characters aren’t really bothersome. The real standout in the cast is Claire Perot as Susini, a cop who’s out for blood after her commanding officer is killed during the proceedings. Her intensity is frightening to behold, and helps to elevate the daring operation that occupies the film’s final scenes to new heights.

This kind of lean and unadorned approached to the action-thriller is what’s missing from most bloated American entries in the genre. Sure, they’re empty calories in either case, but Point Blank makes it clear how much the unnecessary frills actually distract from the thrills. This film’s laserlike focus on delivering exactly what you want and nothing more is what summer popcorn movies ought to be all about.

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Point Blank
Directed by Fred Cavayé
Written by Fred Cavayé and Guillaume Lemans
Starring Gilles Lellouche, Roschdy Zern, Gérard Lanvin, Elena Anaya, Claire Perot
Running time: 84 minutes
Rated R for strong violence and some language.
Opens today at Bethesda Row.