Romain Gavras’s new drama-thriller is about racism, violence and injustice in the Paris banlieues – broadly in the tradition of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine and Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables. It’s spectacular and immersive, with a sensational opening. But it gets bogged down in its own one-note, one-tempo uproar and open-ended parkour camerawork – impressive though that is – and suffers from a number of sneaky false-flag get-out clauses that feel like a cop-out.
It tells the story of four brothers of Algerian origin in the same tough Athena housing estate. Idir has just been killed by a bunch of cops – or guys in cop uniforms – for daring to talk back, an atrocity captured on a viral video. Abdel (Dali Benssalah) is a decorated army hero, Moktar (Ouassini Embarek) is a coke-dealing gangster and Karim (Sami Slimane) is a local guy seething with rage at his brother’s racist murder.
The movie begins with Abdel giving a press conference, flanked by police and politicians, appealing for calm following Idir’s killing and asking people to join him in a “silent march” of peaceful protest. Some hope. In any other movie, that press conference would be a bland opener, a piece of narrative throat-clearing preceding any number of dull dialogue scenes laying out the issues. But not this one. Karim is there at the press conference: he throws a Molotov cocktail at the assembled cops and then, leading hundreds of Athena guys, launches an extraordinary Assault on Precinct 13-style attack on the police station, stealing weapons and a police van before retreating to his inner-city stronghold. This breathtaking action sequence looks like the Battle of Helm’s Deep.