Bastille Day (2016)

Disapointment

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The acting in this movie is really good.

A charming pickpocket, a CIA agent with unorthodox practices and a bunch of villains who can mysteriously infiltrate swat teams pretty much tell what the movie is all about. The one dimensional, dispassionate, taciturn antihero character initially looked funny with Arny starring in Terminator movies and alike. However, when others (Van Damme, Rock, etc.) started to mimic the same wooden acting style, they looked and became outright boring. In this cheesy action movie, the "cool", disinterested acting of Idris Elba evokes the same bad feelings. The plot is so predictable that the pace of the unfolding events always lags behind your guess. This is an action movie that I fell asleep in the last 20 min. or so. The only good thing about it is some nice Paris scenes in the background.

This is at best a 4/10 straight to TV movie so only watch if you have nothing else in mind. It's not deserving of its IMDB 6.3 score in the slightest and surely must have been manipulated or voted up by the Idris Elba fan club At the half way mark you will question whether to stop the movie or see it through. The acting, plot and production all got significantly worse as the movie progressed and even the end credits are no respite from Idris Elba's terribleness as he offers an ear murdering croak of a spoken word song that to be fair does reward the viewer with confirmation that this is truly an awful movie. Idris you can do better than risk your career leading such a weak script with laughable dialogue and by a writer/director with so little experience which is largely from a few tv shows. If this is what now stands for a 6/10 from IMDB I'm raising my bar to never watching anything under a 7.

Alba is a great actor and often plays very well, his performance here was mediocre but still enjoyable. As an action movie it does indeed deliver on action, the story itself however... ..is something completely different. Not only does the story show off the "amazing" Americans by saving the corrupt and incompetent French from a possible terrorist attack in Paris, the story also portrays capitalist propaganda in quite a grasping and striking way. This propaganda enters in two steps: (1) the protesters are given quite some attention and keep being labeled as purely anti-fascist to show that they are indeed good guys, the moment they actually charge the police lines and break through is nearly euphoric; (2) then however enters the second step which pretty much annuls the former by showing us that we indeed may protest but the money that is accumulated by banks and the elite is not ours to take, we may not steal from them as it are their own 'rightful' assets. The French policemen have come to the desperate decision to take the money from the federal reserve as their group was failed by the administration after the loss of 2 team members during a previous operation. They wanted to get even as they felt undervalued and disrespected, now whose fault is that? We can be mad and we may be upset about the inequality or the insane amounts of accumulation over our own backs, but we better not dare to take it back. We may enter the lobby of a bank, shouting and protesting, the vault however is off-limits.

This is an action/adventure and police story but not a spy story. Any mystery to be solved is typical police investigation.This is probably a great movie for those that enjoy action/adventure movies and don't want to think about it too much.The movie is typical. The American CIA avoids working with the French police. The writers rely on that to give the movie more adventure. The French people are quick to follow the leader in protests, such that they are portrayed as not caring what it is that they are protesting. The French police are not shown doing much to solve the problem except go around beating people up.