Luc Besson's Subway (1985)

The French Wikipédia calls this a 'film policier', which is by no means untrue although I'd call it more of an action comedy. Certainly it fits into the category of 'le cinéma du look' described by Raphaël Bassan in La Revue du Cinéma (1989), where style triumphs over substance: right at the beginning we have an impossible car chase, with Fred (Christophe Lambert), having stolen papers at a party attended by businessman-cum-gangster Raymond Kerman (Constantin Alexandrov) and his wife Héléna Kerman (Isabelle Adjani), is forced to escape into the bowels of the métro, where he meets another world.

Here we have Le Roller (Jean-Hugues Anglade), who escapes from his thefts in the métro on roller skates and whose stuntman for apparently impossible feats is world champion Thierry Penot; Jean Reno is the indefatigable player of drumsticks; Gros Bill, the muscle man (Christian Gomba) works on his huge body with huge weights and a few times frees Fred from his handcuffs with his sheer strength; and then there's Richard Bohringer, the métro flower seller, etc: all these people live in parts of the métro commuters never see, they are part of a (usually petty) criminal underworld, a fraternal punk society.

Le commissaire Gesberg (Michel Galabru) makes his entrance walking down the métro steps with a skewed ballet troupe of cops following him. He has a major role in this weird world, chasing the underground folk with his men such as Inspecteur Batman (Jean-Pierre Bacri) and Inspecteur Robin (Jean-Claude Lecas): and here of course we have the crux of the matter: cinema as cross-reference. The beginning, for instance, is a nod to The French Connection and the end, with the dying Fred looking at Héléna, an obvious nod to Godard. Definitely, Besson's films look good.