Bastille Day [2016]

Starring: Idris Elba, Richard Madden, Charlotte Le Bon, José Garcia, Thierry Godard & Kelly Reilly
Directed by: James Watkins

Distributed by: StudioCanal
Release Date: April 2016
Running Time: 92 mins

Synopsis: When pickpocket Michael Mason is mistaken for a terrorist responsible for a blast in Paris, CIA agent Sean Briar must find out the truth and bring the real conspirators to justice.

Following on from his success with Luther, Idris Elba has been a name frequently associated with the role of James Bond, often put forth as a potential successor to Daniel Craig as a way to modernize the franchise. Bastille Day feels like his audition tape for the role, placing Elba in a secret agent / action hero role and letting him loose to see how audiences react. Ironically, he has been paired up with Richard Madden – who after his role in the BBC drama series Bodyguard would also become lined up as a potential replacement for Daniel Craig’s Bond.

Bastille Day, as one might surmise from the name, is set in France ahead of the Bastille Day ceremonies and involves a number of terrorist attacks that result in violence and unrest in the streets of Paris. Unfortunately, this fictional plot is extremely close to real-world events that happened in 2015 & 2016, and so the film was eventually renamed The Take for home release, although I’m not sure how that helps at all.

The film is written and directed by James Watkins, who also directed the British horror Eden Lake, and it features three British leads in Idris Elba, Richard Madden and Kelly Reilly, but for some bizarre reason, it decides to make all three of those characters into Americans, when they could have easily all been British. There is no real reason why the CIA couldn’t have been substituted for MI5, as it has no real bearing on the plot whatsoever, aside from the fact it forced Elba to perform an inconsistent and distracting American accent throughout the film, obliterating the suspension of disbelief every time he opens his mouth. Considering how iconic his voice is from his role in Luther, and more recently the Sky TV ads, it feels like a major misstep to Americanize him, especially when everyone else has their natural French accents.

Elba, once you get past the forced American accent, definitely has a dynamic presence on-screen despite the script’s best attempts to dilute him down to a generic secret agent. A far cry from his nuanced and electrifying performance as Luther, his role here as Sean Briar feels extremely underwritten – in one scene, he is described as “Reckless, insubordinate, and irresponsible” and that feels like it was probably his character direction in the script. Madden, however, gets a bit more of a character arc as he swings from an unrepentant loner pickpocket to a guilt-ridden, loyal team-player within the film’s ninety-minute runtime. He plays the smart-ass rebel quite well, and the buddy-cop relationship between him and Elba develops well throughout the film. At times, it felt reminiscent of the film Safe House, starring Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds as a similarly mismatched pair – in fact, multiple story beats from that film reoccur in this one.

The French cast were extremely effective in the roles, whether it was Thierry Godard as the lead villain of the piece – infusing his vicious leader with a brutish intelligence, or the charismatic José Garcia as the DGSI director, who seemed to fluctuate between looking like Robert Downey Jr, Harvey Keitel and Christoph Waltz in every scene he was in. Charlotte Le Bon also stands out as the female lead, displaying a sense of vulnerability and guilt about her actions that resonates off the screen. The dynamic between Elba, Madden and Le Bon is enjoyable towards the end of the film, but with such a short running time, it does feel slightly unearned and rushed at times.

More complex than it initially appears, Bastille Day’s storyline is certainly engaging and involves a number of disparate threads such as political unrest, terrorism for personal gain, corruption in the police force, police brutality and social media as a tool for stoking rebellion. Given some of the real-world events that have occurred in the years since its release, it is a somewhat uncomfortable and prophetic watch. The film manages to introduce a number of effective twists – despite the recycling of plot points from the likes of Die Hard and Safe House, and Watkins’ direction infuses a distinctively French atmosphere to the film – a remarkable feat considering a great deal of the film was actually filmed in London.

Bastille Day is a solid action thriller that is hampered by some peculiar directorial choices – most notably forcing three of its well-known British actors to adopt slightly dodgy American accents for no apparent reason. The subject matter makes for awkward viewing, especially considering the similarities to real-world terror attacks, but the film remains engaging throughout. It doesn’t quite hammer its many political allegories home, instead making a bait-and-switch on the motivations of the ‘terrorists’ midway through the movie. There are a number of effective action set-pieces to keep things lively, such as a rooftop chase and a confined fistfight within a police van, elevating it above the typical straight-to-DVD action movie fare. As an audition piece for Idris Elba to take on the role of James Bond, it doesn’t quite showcase his strengths as an actor, and personally, I thought that it paled in comparison to Henry Cavill’s own ‘audition piece’ in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.