Are Netflix subscribers fans of Alban Lenoir? After “Lost Bullet” and “Aka”, the new action film by the 43-year-old actor has just made an explosive entry into the ranking of the most consumed content on the American streaming platform. Posted online on Friday March 29, 2024, “The Wages of Fear”, a remake of a cult feature film released in 1953, rose to the top of the world charts in less than 48 hours. According to data collected by the specialized site FlixPatrol, the film by Julien Leclercq, director of the film “Braqueurs” (2016) is number 1 in 33 countries including France, Mexico, Morocco, Canada… In the United States, the film ranks second behind the film "Mr. Wolff" starring Ben Affleck.
Adapted from a novel of the same name by Georges Arnaud, it starred Yves Montand Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli and Peter Van Eyck in the shoes of four truck drivers engaged in a perilous mission. Their goal: to transport a dangerous and highly unstable load of nitroglycerin to an oil well, in order to extinguish a dangerous fire. A critical and popular success, the original film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival as well as the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. He had also already been entitled to a first American remake, entitled “The Sorcerer”, and directed by William Friedkin.
This time, if the principle remains the same, the 2024 version promises to be even more explosive. The synopsis revealed by the streaming giant sets the tone: “in the middle of the desert, near a refugee camp, an oil well catches fire, directly threatening the lives of the populations. Dispatching experts to the site, the company that operates the site understands that it has only one solution to avoid disaster: cause, within 24 hours, an explosion of the oil well using nitroglycerin. For a large sum of money, a shock team is then sent 800 km away to transport 200 kg of explosives aboard two trucks,” we can read.
To compose the new quartet of this “shock team”, the action feature film called on Alban Lenoir, already starring in “Lost Ball” and “AKA” (the most viewed French film of all time on Netflix), but also Franck Gastambide, Sofiane Zermani and finally Ana Girardot, the first woman to play one of the main characters in this story.
