Pour Elle (Anything For Her) (2008)

French genre cinema in the Tell No One (2006) mould, Fred Cavayé's Pour Elle (Anything For Her) (2008) is a rather simple-minded thriller that fails to make good on its promising premise: the response of a devoted husband (Vincent Lindon) to the incarceration of his wife (Diane Kruger) on a murder charge. Where Tell No One bogged itself down with increasingly berserk convolutions, Anything For Her suffers from the opposite problem: it’s too straightforward. You keep waiting for some complications, revelations or twists to be injected into the scenario, but none are forthcoming. An early flashback gives away too much too soon, leaving the viewer in no doubt as to the wife’s innocence, and the film soon becomes a fairly banal can-our-hero-spring-his-beloved-from-prison romp. Although the movie remains moderately entertaining, it’s far from all it could have been. The talented Kruger does fairly well in an under-written part, but Lindon isn’t an especially appealing lead and the supporting roles are written (and performed) without distinction. Missable.