The Takedown
Louis Leterrier's Netflix actioneer offers noble ideas and lacking execution.
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I didn’t know “The Takedown” (now streaming on Netflix) was a sequel to the 2014 title “On the Other Side of the Tracks” when offering to review it. I’ve never seen “OtOSotT,” but that hardly seems to matter.
The driving force behind me reviewing “The Takedown” was the fact that Louis Leterrier directed it. Leterrier, a protégé of Luc Besson, has been in the news a good deal over the past week for replacing Justin Lin as director of “Fast X,” the tenth entry in “The Fast and the Furious” franchise. Leterrier’s career has been a bit of a mixed bag for me. I outright love the Besson-penned and produced Jet Li vehicle “Unleashed.” I enjoyed “The Incredible Hulk” and the 2010 remake of “Clash of the Titans” more than most. “The Transporter,” “Transporter 2,” “Now You See Me” and “Grimsby” are all varying degrees of OK.
Leterrier now tries his hand at the tried-and-true buddy cop formula with “The Takedown,” which pairs Omar Sy (he played Bishop in “X-Men: Days of Future Past”) and Laurent Lafitte (Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle”) as mismatched former Parisian police partners. Ousmane Diakhité (Sy) is a single dad who’s worked his way up the ranks. He’s a tough guy with an aversion to blood. The brass want to use Ousmane’s blackness as a recruiting tool – a prospect in which he has absolutely zero interest. François Monge (Lafitte) is the moneyed son of bureaucrats. His career has been at a standstill due to his womanizing ways and an adherence to annoying his colleagues.
The duo’s drawn together when François discovers a man’s severed torso lodged between two train cars. The investigation takes them to a provincial French Alps town where they’re aided by fellow officer Alice (French singer Izïa Higelin). Both men take an immediate shine to her – so much so that they initially assume the case is drug-related and overlook possible ties to the town’s French Nationalist mayor Brunner (Dimitri Storoge).
“The Takedown” doesn’t reach the heights of the best buddy cop movies such as “Lethal Weapon” and “Bad Boys,” but it’s not without its charms. Sy and Lafitte are certainly likable and have decent enough chemistry. Action beats involving Ousmane engaging in a mixed-martial arts brawl, a go-kart chase wherein the perpetrator chucks bananas à la “Mario Kart” and a decapitation for the ages certainly elevate the proceedings.
“The Takedown” should be applauded for calling out French nationalism (white nationalism should be squashed in France, the United States, everywhere), but the script by Stéphane Kazandjian (he came up with the scenario for “Taxi 5” alongside Besson) does so too simplistically and often contradicts itself. Ousmane having a crowd of color chant, “The Police!,” like they’re cheering for the national football team after doling out an MMA beatdown is sorta disconcerting. (You could argue this was copaganda if the police outside of Ousmane and François weren’t depicted as being incompetent and/or nationalistic.) There’s also enough gay panic where you’d assume Mike Pence did an uncredited rewrite.
“The Takedown” is overlong at 119 minutes and has a twist you’ll see coming from a mile away, but its candy-colored chaos is diverting enough. Mostly I was left wishing that Lin were still in the “Fast X” driver’s seat.