Bastille Day

How to solve a rid­dle like Idris Elba? The cam­era loves him. He slots eas­i­ly into a wide range of styles and gen­res. And he appears to take his craft seri­ous­ly. He should be wad­ing, waste-deep, in stat­uettes by now, but it’s sad to have to acknowl­edge that he has yet to ful­fil his poten­tial as a film actor. Even half of that poten­tial if we’re being bru­tal. On the small screen, in the likes of Luther and The Wire, he just works. But when the scope widens just a small frac­tion, it all seems to fall apart.

Bastille Day is anoth­er sor­ry case in point, a film that’s not wor­thy to touch the hem of its lead­ing man’s gar­ment. Elba plays Sean Bri­ar – a mav­er­ick, rene­gade, no-shit-tak­er, etc. He’s a CIA oper­a­tive work­ing out of Paris with a remit of detect­ing and foil­ing ter­ror­ist plots. A bomb goes off and peo­ple die, appar­ent­ly plant­ed by rap­scal­lion pick­pock­et Michael Mason (Richard Mad­den). It just hap­pens that there was a dirty clump of plas­tic explo­sive hid­den with­in a ted­dy­bear in a bag he snatched, but if he’s not at fault, then who set this device to go boom?

With­in the first 15 min­utes of the film, the bat­tle lines between who’s good and who’s bad are so firm­ly estab­lished that any poten­tial for sur­prise in the ensu­ing 75 min­utes is sad­ly neu­tralised. Much mileage is extract­ed from Mason and Briar’s mis-matched rela­tion­ship, the for­mer the cheeky, fast-talk­ing sleight-of-hand artist, the lat­ter the bur­ley, mono­syl­lab­ic destruc­tion artist. Though ten­sions are high in the French cap­i­tal, gov­ern­ment offi­cials ques­tion whether mat­ters are so bad that the nation­al Bastille Day hol­i­day should be can­celled this year. Yet it tran­spires that the evil­do­ers are look­ing to re-storm the ​“bastille” (the nation­al bank) and steal a huge amount of mon­ey in the name of an anti-cap­i­tal­ist coup.

Polit­i­cal­ly the film doesn’t stray too far onto dubi­ous ground – it chal­lenges the assump­tion that when there’s an attack on a major world cap­i­tal, our accusato­ry glance is imme­di­ate­ly trained towards reli­gious groups, eth­nic minori­ties or left­ist pro­tes­tors. There are also some nice­ly chore­o­graphed action set pieces that rely on move­ment and detail rather than loud nois­es and bom­bast. A play has been made to secure Elba his own Tak­en-style hard man fran­chise, and whether it results in fur­ther adven­tures will be entire­ly down to box office receipts.