Loin du périph

Take Down (Loin du Périph).

Once again, director Louis Leterrier and actor Omar Sy work together. After directing a few episodes of the great series Lupin, Leterrier is behind the camera in this French crime comedy available on Netflix.

It's a beat-up story, with two cops of different styles who haven't seen each other in a long time, having to work together to investigate a murder in a small French town.

Clichés after clichés, predictability, bad jokes. What saves is the always enlightened presence of Omar Sy, playing the police officer Ousmane Diakhité and some fun scenes between him and Laurent Lafitte, a member of La Comédie-Française, who in the film is the police officer François Monge.

It's a typical afternoon session movie, to watch, rest your head, laugh a little and then forget about it.

If you remove a couple of nude scenes this would be a funny cop movie for Nickelodeon. The comedy is forced, the action is edited so much that you not sure what is happening(there was 23 edits in 10 seconds). When it is not over-edited, the comedy scenes are drawn out to make sure you chuckle. On top of that, it plays most of the cliches' to overcome the non-existant writing. If you like simple, not serious, dumb movie to pass the time, then this is for you. If you are a thinker...skip.

Between bombastic action sequences that take way too long to get where they're going, a predictable plot and leaning heavily into screwball buddy-cop comedy that just doesn't land, this is mostly a misfire. Sy and Lafitte do their best with the material, and Izia Higelin brings her own brand of luminous charisma to her screen time, but they're let down by weak writing and embarrassingly juvenile jokes at every turn. One is better off watching a movie that does this formula right, like Rush Hour or the original Lethal Weapon.

Well acted, funny, humorous, and with many unexpected events. It is also funny to see all the lepenists (and friends) getting angry and writing bad reviews to this very funny and unexpected movie. But we all know their feelings, when people make fun of their ancient approach to life ;-)

Most cliché movie I've seen in forever, it's so predictable it hurts. Such a shame since the cast is actually quite capable and the plot isn't half bad.