Mark Reviews Movies: THE TAKEDOWN

The Takedown, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 6, 2022

As with its predecessor, The Takedown is a generic mismatched-buddy-cop movie that's primarily of intrigue for its cast and its tonal inconsistency. In fact, the most intriguing thing about this sequel for most might be learning that it is, indeed, a sequel.

The original, titled On the Other Side of the Tracks in English, was released ten years ago in its native France, before receiving a very limited release in the United States a couple years later (This critic only learned of its existence and watched it in preparation for this movie). There was nothing special about it, save for the charms of its two stars: Omar Sy, playing a police detective who likes to pretend that he's street-smart, and Laurent Lafitte, as the by-the-books Paris detective who's not so secretly both an egomaniac and a sex addict.

In the first movie, the two unlikely partners teamed up to solve a murder case. Coming as a shock to absolutely no one, they found a way to put their differences aside, discover that each can learn from the other, and close the books on a big criminal conspiracy.

In other words, one doesn't need to see the original movie to understand this decade-later follow-up. Indeed, screenwriter Stéphane Kazandjian and director Louis Leterrier, neither of whom were involved in the previous entry, more or less write off what has come before in the relationship between and the adventures of Sy's Ousmane Diakité and Lafitte's François Monge.

When the two cops meet again to solve yet another mysterious murder, they're mostly friendly and a bit passive-aggressive with each other. The two were partners many years ago, according to this hastened recap, but a woman, whom Ousmane liked but François bedded, came between them.

In the intervening years, Ousmane has become a top detective in Paris' Crime Division. His re-introduction (or what's certain to be an initial introduction for a good number of people), in which he fights a suspect in a cage match while his backup is lost in a maze of corridors, gives us a sense of this installment's continuing tongue-in-cheek humor. Leterrier's direction, with its moving camera and garishly over-lit backdrops (Thomas Hardmeier's cinematography somehow makes sunlight as distracting as the neon lighting of the opening street fight), forgoes the first movie's attempts at gritty realism, though, so at least we're kind of prepared for how some of the story's more serious turns are given a slightly discomforting edge of comedy.

Meanwhile, François has been demoted to a precinct beat, almost certainly because he slept with the wrong woman—just as he successfully flirts with his department-mandated therapist in his re-introduction. Kazandjian attempts to give François' womanizing ways a bit of some ten-years-later context, as the guy asks for consent but does spy on a naked woman in the shower, much to Ousmane's disapproval (A rushed and forgotten subplot, in which the department wants to make Ousmane a recruiting poster child, offers a similarly ineffective attempt at social commentary/satire).

The two former partners team up yet again after François discovers half of a body on a train. Ousmane is in charge of the investigation, and after getting his mother to call some people in charge, François is put on the case, too. The other half of the body is found in a small town in the country, where local detective Alice (Izïa Higelin) is star-struck by Ousmane.

The murder leads the cops to discover a local drug ring and a sinister political movement, putting up a populist front to voters while working on more diabolical plans in the shadows. It's a plot that is both somewhat commendable, since Kazandjian calls the group's outward xenophobia for what it is and what its ultimate ends would have to be, and a few years late to the party—although, to be fair, this is a sequel that is itself late to its own party.

None of it is taken too seriously, even as the not-too-covert racism of the organization leads them toward a plan of mass, international slaughter. The movie is mostly focused on its humor, which veers from the predictable (Ousmane and François having to share a bed in a cramped hotel room), to the ridiculous (a chase that revolves around go-karts), to the grotesque (François' handling of the lower half of a corpse and a decapitation that's played for laughs—although at least the victim is a bigoted fascist). Some of the humor here works, thanks to the equal but distinct charisma of Sy and Lafitte, but jammed together and within the context of the story's severe political developments, the disparate parts never form a cohesive whole.

The Takedown goes bigger and sillier than its predecessor. At its heart, though, this is still a generic piece of formula, and the movie's superficial excesses only make its inherent flaws more apparent.

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