“French Connection II” is a thrilling, neo-noir thriller all its own, as Doyle and his Marseilles contact, Inspector Barthélémy (Bernard Fresson), try like mad to bust up a drug smuggling ring and capture its elusive leader, Alain Charnier (Rey), before he disappears into the shadows again. By itself, the movie is an excellent addition to Frankenheimer’s brass-knuckle noirs like “I Walk the Line,” “52 Pick-Up,” and “Ronin.” However, it’s Hackman’s performance which elevates it to being one of the best sequels of all time.
Like other series with problematic characters at their center — including recent examples like “Breaking Bad” and “Joker: Folie à Deux” — “French Connection II” is not-so-secretly an indictment of its protagonist. The film has sympathy for Popeye, but doesn’t request that he ever be forgiven for his actions. For about the first half of the film, Popeye is an obnoxious tyrant, pushing Barthélémy and others around at will. This aspect, combined with Popeye being a fish-out-of-water character having to operate in a strange land, is a joke both on the character himself and any of his fans in the audience. Here is your no-nonsense rogue cop, the film seems to say, acting exactly as you’d expect or maybe even hope he would, and yet none of his methods work; they just make him look even more pathetic than he already did.
Hackman and Frankenheimer don’t let up on the character at that point, though. They go deeper, using the plot point of Charnier capturing Doyle and forcibly turning him into a heroin addict while in captivity to really tear the character down to the bone. Though Frankenheimer doesn’t shoot the movie in the same gritty, street-level, induced documentary style that William Friedkin shot the original, it’s during this sequence that the movie reaches similar depths of bleak despair as shots of ruins in the middle of NYC did in the first film. After the Marseilles police discover the now-a-junkie Doyle and force him to go through withdrawal from drugs cold turkey, there’s a long, unbroken monologue that Hackman gets to deliver as Doyle which is one of the most emotionally naked moments I’ve ever seen any American actor have on screen. In it, Doyle relays a story about how he used to be in the minor leagues with the likes of Mickey Mantle and, instead of pursuing glory as a ball player, decided to join the police force instead. It’s Doyle at simultaneously his most human and most pathetic, and Hackman plays the scene with incredible intelligence and grace.
From there, “French Connection II” earns its justice-by-any-means-necessary grit, and not in any usual manner, either. The film’s lesson is far more complex and nuanced than a platitude or two, as Hackman and Frankenheimer constantly question whether justice is actually being served and in what way, giving Doyle a redemption arc which may be anything but. Hackman’s performance in “French Connection II” is one of the all-time great studies of fragile, stubborn, toxic masculinity, and it’s so impressive that he lends Doyle new depths and richness while retaining the core of the character that won him the Oscar. Hackman takes what could’ve been simple pulp and infuses it with aching, relatable humanity, proving once again how invaluable a performer he was and how massive a loss it is that he’s gone. Despite his absence, it’s somehow comforting to know that his work will live on — like Popeye, Hackman’s legacy simply refuses to ever let go.
