Rating: C-
Dir: Sébastien Baccala and Thomas Khawam
Star: Thomas Khawam, Aurore Planas, Pierre André, Laurent Leca
After sitting through this, I now have more tolerance for super-long Bollywood action films, like the almost 3½-hour Dhurandar. Heck, the last Mission: Impossible film was closing in on three. But they didn’t feel like it. This, on the other hand… Two hours long, it seems more like six. Simply chop off the first fifteen minutes, and the last twenty, and you’d have a better movie, without losing much of significance. For it begins with not one, but two extended prologues. The first depicts the recovery of millions in gold bullion from a secret Nazi bunker at the end of World War II. We then jump to an undercover mission in 2011 Libya.
Finally, we reach the present day, and relevance. We meet three undercover operatives for the French government: Mike (Khawam), Chloé (Planas) and Stan (André). They have a questionable reputation, but get the job done. Their latest job, coming from a government minister, is the recovery of a stolen briefcase. This is hardly a mission impossible. Indeed, it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience. The problems start when Mike goes against orders and opens the case. It contains information related to the location of the bullion, in which a lot of people are understandably very interested. The main one is Vogel (Leca), an even more shady operative, who has crossed their path before. He kidnaps Chloé to assist in decrypting the information, and believes Mike and Stan have been killed.
In a reveal which is so obvious I’m not even calling it a spoiler, the duo are not, in fact, dead. They have to figure out what’s going on, then bust their way into Vogel’s headquarters and rescue their colleague. I will say, the action side of things is decent. The makers call it “a love letter to action cinema from the 90’s,” and they have got that side of things down well enough. It’s clear there wasn’t a lot of money to hand – for most of the shoot, the crew was just a handful of people. But there’s energy here, and the execution is brisk enough to hold your attention. If only the same could be said about the bits between the battles.
There’s no ear for dialogue (the “CIA head” is far too English, for one thing), and no sense of pacing. We get stuff like a visit to Mike’s uncle, which does little more than repeat things we already know, and soap-opera nonsense such as Mike seeing Chloe, who is Stan’s ex-wife. The only element which amused me was a running joke about Vogel’s annoyance at people mispronouncing his name: “It’s Vo-JEL”. I am reluctant to be too harsh, because this clearly comes from a place of passion et amour for the action genre, and was made under difficult, post-COVID circumstances. I’d say Baccala and Khawam might want to get some second-unit experience under their belts, or work on some shorts, before trying again. But I’d be curious to see what they learned here, and brought forward to their next feature.
This is part of our World in Action feature, covering action movies around the globe.