Antigang (2015)
Directed by Benjamin Rocher

Film Review

If director Benjamin Rocher's motivation for making Antigang was to revitalise the French policier he chose a funny way to go about doing it.  The film admits to being a remake of Nick Love's far from successful The Sweeney (2012) (which was itself inspired by a popular television series of the 1970s) but it looks more like a fan's over-enthusiastic homage to the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard movies of the 1980s.  In fact, there's nothing remotely French about the film - it's about as American as a film can be without actually being made in America by an all-American crew.  Yes, the film is set in Paris, but it's not a Paris that anybody who has ever visited the French capital will recognise - it's a synthetic copy of the kind that belongs to a computer game, in which the police behave like gun-toting fascists and robbers are indestructible murdering psychopaths better organised than the American military.  To lighten the mood amidst all this mindless mayhem and mutilation, our affable law enforcers are never short of a quip or two.  If there's any Gallic sophistication in this film, it is very well hidden.

Antigang is a massive step down from the two films that Rocher co-directed prior to this, two fairly respectable horror films which did have the effect of breathing life into a well-worn genre, namely the zombie movie: La Horde (2009) and Goal of the Dead (2014).  For his first solo offering, Rocher is content to slavishly imitate his American counterparts, copying the style of the movies he clearly adulates whilst totally overlooking the very thing that made them so successful, namely a convincing and constantly surprising lead actor.  Instead, we have a somewhat long-in-the-tooth Jean Reno struggling to make anything of his formulaic, two-dimensional character, much as he had done on previous over-blown thrillers such as Mathieu Kassovitz's Les Rivières pourpres (2000). There's a nice rapport between Reno and his co-star Alban Lenoir (the impressive lead in Diastème's Un Français (2015)), but neither of their characters is sufficiently well-developed to make them much more than violence-addicted one-line merchants.  Occasionally, some of the gags hit home, but most go wide of the mark and generally the film's attempts at humour backfire as badly as someone breaking wind in a crowded lift.

The thinnest of plots (lifted entirely from the aforementioned Sweeney movie) serves as a barely adequate backbone for a film that is really nothing more than a cobbled together compendium of ultra-violent action scenes delivered with more élan than logic.  Some of these work well - the film's highpoint is a spectacular chase through the Bibliothèque Nationale - others just look like random splurges of violence for its own sake.  To his credit, Rocher does attempt to manoeuvre the film onto more adult territory in the second half as Reno's character is forced to take a long hard look at himself, but a jarring mismatch soon develops between the more serious and continuing infantile strands of the film.  Without much in the way of plot or character depth to sustain it, Antigang ultimately ends up as nothing more than a poor man's copy of a kind of over-egged action-thriller that went out of fashion years ago.

Film Synopsis

Serge Buren is a cop of some renown, working with a team of younger police officers whose methods are, to say the least, somewhat unconventional.  What does it matter that they dispense with procedure and take a creative approach to law enforcement, if they get the desired results without breaking too many heads?  But now Buren and his team face a much greater challenge, in the form of a gang of murderous robbers that is raiding the capital's banks and jewellers using combat methods.  Is Buren's team equipped to take on such a violent adversary or do they need to change their methods...?