Louis Leterrier’s “The Takedown,” a sequel to the 2012 French buddy cop comedy “On the Other Side of the Tracks,” begins off by recognizing that it’s in some bother. Why pump out one more “Lethal Weapon”-inspired narrative once we’re starting to reckon extra overtly with structural problems in policing? Letterier, beforehand of “The Transporter” and “Now You See Me,” solutions this drawback with ideological and visible gibberish, hoping to create no less than the phantasm of a high-energy distraction. The film’s clumsy dazzling solely reveals the desperation inside, each for Letterier and for what perpetuates the heroic cop story these days.
Omar Sy returns to this now-franchise as Ousmane Diakité, the sort of cop who can maintain his personal even when he is outnumbered and in a cage. A lot, that he beats up a hulking MMA fighter in his personal ring and ends the scene on a triumphant be aware the place he makes the gang shout, “The police! The police! The police!” Ousmane’s beatdown goes viral and conjures up the Paris police to make use of him and his Black pores and skin for his or her chintzy social media marketing campaign, one thing he scoffs at. He is aware of what they’re doing—making an attempt to cowl up the gross actions of different cops, unseen within the movie but very seen in actual life—however, the film itself drops this angle and takes on the responsibility of police PR itself. In the meantime, Ousmane’s former police companion François Monge (Laurent Lafitte) is proven to babble after bedding his therapist, establishing himself as the womanizer of the duo and the generic face of generic whiteness in policing.
All of this lip service, this winking, practically kills the low-level amusement of “The Takedown” when the plot lastly kicks off, after a severed physique is found inside a practice. Reunited by the case, Ousmane and François examine with the assistance of a lady named Alice (Izïa Higelin), who units off each of their boyish inabilities to speak to a lady they discover enticing.
Alice turns into their tour information of kinds by way of the city of the crime, a spot so conservative that the mayor is a not so thinly veiled fascist. As if the film is saying, one could not like cops, however no less than they’re not out-and-out skinheads who even work at a safety firm that has a pseudo-SS image for an emblem. Anywho, the highest half of a man named Kevin results in some sort of factor a few tremendous drugs, considered one of many under-cooked story items on this messy script from Stéphane Kazandjian. There is a bigger conspiracy at hand, albeit expressed with such touch-and-go concepts that there are little emotional stakes even when home for immigrants is focused on a bombing.
The film doesn’t solely have a picture drawback with its cop optics, but in addition, the large, explosive set items that Letterier works additional time to make visually incomprehensible. Making the primary movie appear to be a Sundance drama compared, “The Takedown” is filled with overzealously swooping, shaky cinematography, or jarring cuts that freely take us close-up throughout a scuffle after which all of a sudden put us within the sky, suggesting a private beef between the editors and the battle choreography workforce. This flurry turns sinfully ugly when combined with the digicam’s penchant for large angle lenses that freely distort no matter is on the facet of the body, a horrible combination with a continuously shifting digicam. It’s one other diploma of ridiculous, dizzying, “slick” French motion filmmaking, a direct descendant of the 14 cuts it took for Liam Neeson to jump a fence in Olivier Megaton’s “Taken 3.”
And taking “The Takedown” on the deserves of its two stars, their performances are kind of stapled collectively by generic buddy-cop comedy banter, together with the eye-rolling second when dopey François places his foot in his mouth concerning his whiteness, the 2 sharing a clumsy beat by which he realizes what silly criticism he simply made about his privilege. It’s not common for a film with this many automotive smashes to leave you wanting much less motion and extra speaking, however, our two heroes don’t have a lot of a persona past their appearances (the “mismatched” angle is shrugged off). For all of the film jokes about Ousmane being a tokenized Black cop, the story then doesn’t give him a lot of an inside; and for the set-ups with François, it’s jokes about his poor sexual boundaries within the office at their finest. There’s simply no room for any actual chemistry between these two, like a rom-com with hardly any spark.
Why are we so enamored with cop tales? Why have we empowered them with being our fantasy motion heroes, in flip fetishizing once they must do issues “their own way”? “The Takedown,” as scatterbrained it’s, brings this up however then is simply too cowardly to follow through on it, treating structural police issues as a trending matter that Sy’s appeal and Lafitte’s cringing whiteness might help us overlook for 2 nauseating hours. “The Takedown” works additional time to uphold the façade of heroic policing in essentially the most generic method potential, for God is aware of what higher good.
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