Ah, the buddy cop picture. A French buddy cop picture. They have that? They do. They really, really, do. Er, I mean: Oui. Ils font.
So I gotta ask: buddy cop stuff is so cliché in the United States; is it cliché in France, too? Does Luc Besson personally train all the drivers? Does every officer pack cigarettes? Does a veteran rogue cop have to turn in his baguette and gun? Non? What a shame. There’s so much more to be assumed about rudeness, mimes, horizontal stripes, and topless beaches.
This mystery begins with half a body on a train (the top half, fwiw, so he could pull the emergency lever, I’m guessing). The other half is a hundred miles away, which is pretty neat trick for a guy who might have been alive when he “boarded.” Luckily, Officer Ousmane Diakite (Omar Sy) is coincidentally right there to own this investigation … hey, this immediately makes exactly the same amount of sense as any American buddy cop picture.
And it just wouldn’t be a true buddy cop picture without an unnecessarily complicated pairing that also makes no sense. Enter: François (Laurent Lafitte), a different kind of rogue cop from a completely different department. These two bros are gonna get to the bottom of a French crime ring. Well maybe not, but they are going to locate the bottom half of the train guy. Eventually.
Apparently, there’s a new drug on the street that makes fistfights last two scenes longer than normal. Can Ousmane dismantle drug
trafficking while avoiding the senseless homophobia that has him literally in bed with his partner more than once? Does it even matter? Probably not.
The Takedown ain’t great film. I like Omar Sy, but he’s much better in “Lupin” than this. We know director Louis Leterrier; he has good and bad films; this one really feels like he tried to make a standard buddy cop dreck, only in France. I did enjoy the fact that the bad guys are White Supremacists. As far as I am concerned, Nazis, MAGA, and White Supremacists can be movie villains of choice forever and ever. Is either that or Omar Sy’s charisma enough to save this picture? Non.
French policing is a complicated scene
You’ve no idea how to quell this machine
You get a badge and a gun
And a baguette for fun
With HQ showing Jerry Lewis on the screen
Rated TV-MA, 119 Minutes
Director: Louis Leterrier
Writer: Stéphane Kazandjian
Genre: Le ciné de buddy cop
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Laurent Lafitte’s agent
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: White supremacists
