French Connection II (1994)

When people remember The French Connection, it's mostly for Gene Hackman's portrayal of Popeye Doyle and an astonishing car chase; otherwise the picture is a fairly conventional New York City cop story. For its vastly underrated sequel, however, director John Frankenheimer sent Doyle to Marseilles and came up with something a little tougher — 119 minutes of brutality and degradation set in a moral universe where everybody is corrupt except the hero. French Connection II is not exactly a fun flick (there's a harrowing sequence where the bad guys shoot Hackman full of heroin, for example), but in its own twisted way it's something of an art film — perhaps the most profoundly absurdist and pessimistic detective film ever made. A