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Very disappointing...

Good movie but grossly overrated

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The leads are both very good—Noiret being perhaps the best of the two …--yet without having much stuff to play. The two central characters are poorly written, with not much intrinsic interest. I expected—I must confess—a thrilling hunt game—a wild hunt, in an ever accelerating pace; a savage confrontation of energies—or, at least, a game of subtlety, intelligence, wit and cunning. Yet, the film is but a police procedural, too well performed by Noiret and Galabru; the truth is that this crap director did not deserve such actors. The characters remain unexplained, unexplored and indifferent to the viewer, despite the prodigious art of Galabru and Noiret. While Noiret elegantly, impassibly exercised his mastery, Galabru looked very willing to invest, to create, to find his character's life ….The director is inept, the script is crap. THE JUDGE AND THE ASSASSIN has nor the excitement of a larger—than—life manhunt ,neither that of an abundant deploy of intelligence, shrewdness, intuition, psychology. The whole movie is wrong—wrong from the concept. It amounts to no more than a police procedural, without excitement, atmosphere or suspense. It also ends on a dignified crap note of social vindication. The viewer has the feeling, the perception that everything in this movie was irrelevant, insipid. No excitement, of whatever kind; no life, that is,in it,and no valid creation. Only a pretentious leftist police procedural. The actors are first—hand, Noiret reopens the drawer with ambiguous, eerie characters (his character here is not without reminding the one in LA GRANDE BOUFFE);yet the movie does not find its tone—that is, the director does not find the film's tone.

I can't make a real judgment on this film, although the other reviews are rave ones. I just want to add that the story is based on an actual case of the 1890s in France. Joseph Vacher was the real life murderer who is the basis for Michel Galabrue's Joseph Bouvier. Like Vacher he was a former soldier, and he went about the countryside slaughtering young boy shepherds and young girl servants. His destruction of these victims (in terms of mutilations) rivaled his contemporary Jack the Ripper (Vacher was known as Vacher the Ripper). Although he was quite insane the public demanded a death penalty - he was guillotined in 1898. His crimes briefly took public attention off the matter of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.The Philippe Noiret character is partly based on the noted criminologist Professor Alexander Lacassagne, who (despite considerable evidence of insanity) determined that Vacher was sane, and deserved the death penalty.

Michel Galabru got the highest french award for his role in this movie, the "Cesar du meilleur acteur". Galabru became then one of the greatest actor in France.Either in comedy or in tragedy (see "Le gendarme" and "L'été meurtrier".

A French provincial town in the late 1890's where a Judge attempts to advance his political power by trying to prove that a soldier was not insane at the time of committing murder, which means soilder gets the guillotine and not the mad house. A movie that is more about the social turmoil in France.