The Takedown Review: Lupin’s Omar Sy adds spark to a standard action film

French actor Omar Sy is having a moment, and it’s been a long time coming. Even since his breakout role in Critical Hit The UntouchablesSy has spent the last decade tossing between minor supporting roles in American blockbusters (X-Men: Days of Future Past and Jurassic world) and providing French overdubs for animated films (The Angry Birds movie and Soul). He found success in his native France and starred in the crime thriller On the other side of the tracks. But only in his starring role as an irresistible gentleman thief in the Netflix heist series lupine that he found a second wave.

Now he’s riding that crest as a similarly charming character in a sequel to on the other side of the tracks, the buddy cop movie directed by Louis Leterrier The takedown. In this film, Leterrier’s first French-language feature film, Sy returns as Captain Ousmane Diakhité, a rising star in the Paris police force who rises to greater prominence after busting an MMA fight while defeating a powerful pugilist, and video of it goes into action viral.

However, his crime-solving skills are put to the test when a decapitated torso mysteriously appears on a train. It is discovered by Diakhité’s vain former partner François Monge (Laurent Lafitte). Despite François’ rich perfume and tailored clothes, he is just a regular officer who was banished to a precinct after several attempts to apply for a promotion. Seeing this case as his big break, he teams up with Diakhité to venture into a racist French enclave to solve the murder.

As a director, Leterrier knows how to have fun. He demonstrated his flair for complicated set pieces in the film about the manic magic heist Now you see Me and the martial arts action film Unleashed, who has Jet Li as an enforcer, who was raised as a human attack dog. Leterrier spices up his compositions with dynamic tones of orange, red and blue, giving his action a far more playful palette than the gritty grunge aesthetic of modern action films The Adam Project or The 355. (Leterrier recently replaced Justin Lin as director of the Fast & Furious series Fast X.)

The actors also provide a spark. Sy and Lafitte share a good give and go spirit, with their characters exchanging barbs about their respective love lives and career accomplishments. These jokes find more laughs as the story progresses. In a small town, Ousmane and François team up with local police officer Alice (French rock star Izïa Higelin) who is a blank slate as a prototypical love interest with very little personality. Compared to the extravagant ladies’ man François and the enchanting Ousmane, she hardly stands out. But the trio pull off gags as Ousmane and François compete to prove who’s the better detective.

Once in a while The takedown seems to be enjoying himself too much. Chasing a suspect through a laser tag maze turns into a go-kart chase through a mall that takes way too much time. Likewise, a last race in the orange jeep over hill and dale and between mountain passes loses a bit of fun with every arduous curve. Somewhere in the two-hour running time there is a tight, exciting 90 minutes. But too much fat stifles the potential.

Especially with a film with so few narrative surprises, the overtime makes little sense. We know who the villain is and which mole will betray Ousmane and François at the beginning of the film, leaving it up to Sy and Lafitte to keep the proceedings going anyway. Thankfully, Sy in particular can handle the load. Though the script relies on cheesy, underdeveloped gay panic jokes, his affable and innocent personality delivers those unsteady beats with aplomb. And his physicality, which is as at home in grueling fight sequences as it is in light flirtations with Izïa, begs the question of what kind of James Bond he would be if the thought of a French actor playing the English spy weren’t British would make you queasy.

The first surprises in The takedown come from the way such a light-hearted adventure deals with heavy political issues. Ousmane struggles with tokenism within the Paris Police Department as they attempt to turn it into a recruitment tool. François laughs how hard it is for a rich white man to succeed in this world.

Stéphane Kazandjian’s screenplay is often too simplistic to effectively land these racial themes. The city’s villainous white fascist mayor (Dimitri Storoge) is a totem of the other real-life populist governments sweeping across Europe. Instead of a stronger script, Storoge plays the mayor broadly as a vile man with terrible intentions – specifically, he wants to rid France of non-white refugees. That goal, while sickening, doesn’t add a particularly palpable sinister edge to the story. Instead, this mayor is a boring, anticlimactic adversary. If more attention were paid to these issues, perhaps they would discover their intended severity.

Despite a few more distractions and the lack of suspense, Sy and Lafitte still lead the day. They give the story a kinetic energy and loose rhythm that makes the meandering of the narrative more palatable, while not breaking out of the usual action movie mold. If you miss the days when this kind of wide-ranging action-crime story had colorful visions and lovable leads, The takedown could offer a temporary solution.

The takedown now streaming on Netflix.