Director James Watkins (Eden Lake, Woman in Black) debarks his dread coaxing comfort zone for a dip into generic action bunkum with this frothy yet hackneyed espionage thriller.
Wily pickpocket Michael Mason (Richard Madden) nabs a distraught woman’s handbag and is subsequently sucked into a terror-cell’s stratagem. Mason goes on the run, after inadvertently planting a bomb in the centre of Paris, while Idris Elba’s “reckless and irresponsible” CIA operative Sean Briar attempts to track him down. Elba punches his way through crowds, conversations and anyone passing, much to the dismay of his sullen superiors hoping to operate covertly under the French authorities’ radar.
Bastille Day starts as a frivolous action romp but stumbles into chestnut laden terrain while juddering under the weight of its own platitudes. Jovial quips and high-octane stunts grasp attention before the story veers through genre tent-poles into a claptrap finale that’s so gratingly inane it’s beyond parody. Citing 48 Hours as an inspiration, Watkins, and debut screenwriter Andrew Baldwin, instil fun via the mismatched partners and their insolent spiel. Foreign villain stereotypes and double-crossing cops dot paths with bombs, bodies and the type of trite banter which spiked the films that inspired them, but there is nothing new or invigorating in terms of plot progression.
The central concept is intriguing but ultimately over-similar, and as airless as, latter day Luc Besson produced thrillers. Sadly it is from its faux pas application of exhausted action tropes where the bigger laughs derive. Deliberate comedy works at times but the clichéd clangers are so catastrophic, Bastille Day helplessly deviates into crushing self-mockery.
Elba slips effortlessly into the role of rasping action lug with the hoarse oesophagus of Jason Statham, the bulk of an alp and the innate audacity to throttle henchmen with his foot and threaten an old lady with a knife. There is a risk Elba could vanish into the Vinnie Jones video bin of lost action heroes should a fodder penchant flourish, yet he remains highly watchable as Briar.
Director Watkins makes a commendable transition into action (from horror), staging punchy foot chase and fight sequences with playful elation, but the old action facets meld poorly with the espionage, reconnaissance and comedy components. Terrorists using social media to announce their evil scheme is the stuff of latter day Brosnan Bonds: spurring laughs by having characters bark lines like “Send out the last hash-tag” in a fatalistic manner.
This leads to a ludicrous conclusion involving a communist uprising and a covert bank job which initially threatens to topple Bastille Day into Naked Gun terrain but merely mutates it into just another slap of banal action silage. Bastille Day thuds with energised fun for the first half but eventually ails with the sterile air of a latter-day, Euro-shot Steven Seagal feature.
