French non-thriller Agents Secrets aka Spy Bound (a completely meaningless title) may be the only picture to give Timbo Hines' War of the Worlds a run for its money in the most walking scenes in a single motion picture stakes. Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring didn't spend as much time walking as Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci and co do in Frederic Schoendoerffer's exercise in designer tedium. Admittedly it's glamorous movie stars glossily photographed walking in exotic locations, but it's not even walking to anywhere, it's just purposeful but gratuitous walking. Even when two frogmen slip into the water to plant a mine it cuts away to  you guessed it<br /><br />When, after 40 minutes, Bellucci reveals she's planning to quit the French secret service, you think: her legs must have got tired of all the walking. Unfortunately for her, she fails to walk through customs with 150g of heroin her employers have planted on her and it's not long before she's walking down the endless pristine and very white corridors of a prison that looks like it was designed by Louis Vitton for a Gap ad. Luckily Vincent Cassel is able to walk past them by putting on glasses, a scarf and a bit of cardboard in his mouth, but he's really cut up about it: he goes for a walk to his old girlfriend, them, after feeding her cat and trying to write, goes for a walk to see another friend... Even when he's tailing a suspect, he gets out of his car to... do I even need to type the rest of the sentence?<br /><br />It's a big-budget picture for a French film, but it really does feel like the picture started without a script - of any kind - and since they had the crew and the actors they had to film something, anything, but the only thing they could think of was... walking. You can't help wondering if Schoendoerffer was trying for a pared-down Jean-Pierre Melville-style minimalism, but for most of the picture there's even less than meets the eye going on here. The characters are blank slates, the cynicism standard issue and even the reliable Bruno Coulais' score never develops a real theme.<br /><br />Which is a shame, because the plot isn't bad when it finally kicks in - in the last twenty minutes. Very loosely inspired by the sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, it revolves around a plot to persuade an arms dealer to use his influence in Africa to suit French interests by blowing up a ship carrying his latest consignment. Naturally things go wrong, ulterior motives are revealed, everyone becomes expendable, Monica gets her tits out and the tone becomes completely schizoid as if the script finally arrived a few days before filming finished and they rushed to fit it all in. While for the first 90 minutes it's a film that equates boredom with realism, walking with paranoia and monosyllabic scripting with profundity, for the last couple of reels we get a half-hearted car chase, an impressive car crash (that leads to a moment of utter absurdity as a third viewing of the scene suddenly reveals a previously invisible survivor running across a motorway in plain sight), silly disguises, unarmed combat with a lesbian CIA hitwoman and the obligatory symbolic falling off a building dream scene as it ticks off the genre staples to throw in enough action to put together a decent trailer (certainly a parachute jump and the opening CGi cosmic zoom from the dark side of the Moon to close-up on a ferry with an unfortunately ridiculous sense of scale seem designed more for marketing than narrative purposes). There's a good but all-too-brief moment with some sharks and a neat touch where the victim of a setup by the French secret service has to pay the cost of the operation but while no film that begins with Charles Berling being killed can be all bad, this pretty much manages it. The fact that the film boasts a surprising number of rave reviews from one-time-only reviewers with no posting history from French-language territories tells its own story.