Bastille Day – HE review

Set in Paris in the lead up to the French national day, Bastille Day is an action-thriller featuring British actor Idris Elba (Pacific Rim) as a rogue CIA agent.

He plays Sean Briar, the agent tasked with trying to come to terms with what at first appearances could be a terrorist attack. An explosion kills four people, but that is not what was originally planned. The woman carrying the bag with the explosive device in it – Zoe Naville (Charlotte Le Bon) – had it stolen by an American pickpocket, Michael Mason (Richard Madden from TV’s Game of Thrones), who is living in the French capital. Now both Zoe and Michael are the targets of an international manhunt.

Briar soon realises that Michael is just a pawn in a much bigger game and is also his best asset to uncover a large-scale conspiracy. Breaking protocol, as is his wont, Briar recruits Michael to use his expert pickpocketing skills to help quickly track down the source of the corruption. Though extremely wary at first, Michael soon realises that Briar is his only option of getting out of his predicament alive.

The original idea was to create a movie that combined the taut action of the Bourne franchise with the character-rich experiences of films such as Frantic and The French Connection. While Bastille Day is not without merit, especially with the muscle-bound Elba at is core, it is one of those movies where you need to suspend belief to get the most out of it. Leaving aside its violence, the extent of the corruption can only be labeled unrealistic.

Although an unlikely pairing, the chemistry between Elba and Madden works and helps keep the action moving. Le Bon isn’t used as much as she could have been, but is imperative in the set up.

The film was co-written and directed by James Watkins (The Woman in Black) from an original concept by Andrew Baldwin. Watkins, a British filmmaker, sees Alfred Hitchcock as his hero and regards Bastille Day as having a classic Hitchcockian thriller set-up, in that it is about the wrong man being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The pickpocket picks the wrong pocket and unwittingly becomes the catalyst for a sequence of events that gets increasingly out of hand.

I enjoyed the set up more than the finale. Rated M, Bastille Day scores a 6½ out of 10.

Bastille Day is out now on DVD, Blu-ray and on-demand.

Alex First