The Takedown movie review & film summary (2022)
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 notice the place he makes the group shout, “The police! The police! The police!” Ousmane’s beatdown goes viral, and evokes 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 however very seen in actual life—however the film itself drops this angle and takes on the obligation of police PR itself. In the meantime, Ousmane’s former police accomplice François Monge (Laurent Lafitte) is proven babbling to after which bedding his therapist, establishing himself as each 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 prepare. Reunited by the case, Ousmane and François examine with the assistance of a girl named Alice (Izïa Higelin), who units off each of their boyish inabilities to speak to a girl they discover engaging.
Alice turns into their tour information of kinds by means 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 might not like cops, however at the least they’re not out-and-out skinheads who even work at a safety firm that has a pseudo SS image for a brand. Any who, the highest half of a man named Kevin results in some sort of factor a couple of tremendous drug, one among 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’s little emotional stakes even when a home for immigrants is focused for a bombing.
The film doesn’t solely have a picture drawback with its cop optics, but in addition the massive, explosive set items that Letterier works extra time to make visually incomprehensible. Making the primary movie seem like a Sundance drama as compared, “The Takedown” is full of overzealously swooping, shaky cinematography, or jarring cuts that freely take us close-up throughout a scuffle after which abruptly put us within the sky, suggesting a private beef between the editors and the combat choreography staff. This flurry turns into sinfully ugly when blended with the digicam’s penchant for broad angle lenses that freely distort no matter is on the aspect of the body, a horrible combine with a always transferring 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 leap a fence in Olivier Megaton’s “Taken 3.”
