Bastille Day

This review may contain spoilers!

While this feels like every action film I've ever seen before I found it to be a lot of fun and quite entertaining. I would give Bastille Day a 6/10.

This film is certainly generic but it works really well, you are hooked on the action and want to see the threat dealt with as the film progresses; so the film is at the very least engaging. I wasl also surprised to see a rather interesting subject brooked by this film: the villains manipulate prejudice towards Muslims by framing several mosques in this film. It's a really interesting aspect of the film, especially after the recent Paris attacks; there's a theme that appearances can be deceiving and that you can't make a snap judgement of a person/culture which I really like. The score for this film sounds brilliant, it's very thrilling and lends to the action quite well. The fight choreography has to be my favourite aspect of the film, the one in the back of the van is by far my favourite because everything feels so raw and desperate.

Richard Madden, who played Michael Mason, was a rather charismatic and likeable thief in this film; I thought Madden brought a lot of depth to a role that could have been very two dimensional in the hands of a lesser actor. Charlotte Le Bon, who played Zoe Naville, really played a character who was heavy with guilt and grief; I enjoyed seeing her reaction to the bomb attack and how deeply it affected her role. Anatol Yusef, who played Tom Luddy, gave a very bona fide performance of a special service operative; I liked the opposition Yusef created between him and Elba. Jose Garcia, who played Victor Gamieux, was a really surprising antagonist in this film; the shock when he killed Reilly was incredible and from there on out he served the film really well. Eriq Ebouaney, who played Baba, really had some good chemistry with Madden in this film; his indifferent haggling made him a great pawnbroker in this film. Thierry Godard, who played Rafi Bertrand, was a very calculating antagonist for most of this film; it was interesting when he became very desperate and wild by the end of the film.

However the best performance came from Idris Elba, who played Sean Briar. In Bastille Day Elba is like a one man military force, he is the human embodiment of a tank. He has such an incredible presence that whenever the film starts gearing towards an action scene you can visually see how tense and alert Elba's role becomes. I think he played a hardass action film protagonist extremely well; though there were some great moments of empathy between him and Madden as the film progressed.

This film can't escape from the fact that it doesn't aim to do anything new, you're left listening to familiar dialogue or plot points as old as the eighties. This lack of originality makes the film boring more at the start than anywhere else; it isn't until the film nears the end that it really starts to find it's feet and pick up the pace. I also thought the cinematography was quite poor for an action film, the shots were very basic and didn't have you one the edge of your seat. A significant part of this was also the editing, the cuts that took too long to happen meant that the film was a very slow action movie.

Kelly Reilly, who played Karen Dacre, didn't have a whole lot of impact upon this film; the most interesting thing her role provided was her death. Jerome Gaspard, who played Yves, was a rather lacking minor antagonist in this film; most of the minor antagonistic roles didn't provide much in terms of their characters.