Omar Sy returns as Ousmane Diakité, the kind of cop who can hold his own even when he’s outnumbered and in a cage. So much, that he beats up a hulking MMA fighter in his own ring and ends the scene on a triumphant note where he makes the crowd shout, “The police! The police! The police!” Ousmane’s beatdown goes viral, and inspires the Paris police to use him and his Black skin for their chintzy social media campaign, something he scoffs at. He knows what they’re doing—trying to cover up the gross actions of other cops, unseen in the film but very visible in real life—but the movie itself drops this angle and takes on the duty of police PR itself. Meanwhile, Ousmane’s former police partner François Monge (Laurent Lafitte) is shown babbling to and then bedding his therapist, establishing himself as both the womanizer of the duo and the generic face of generic whiteness in policing. 

All of this lip service, this winking, nearly kills the low-level amusement of “The Takedown” when the plot finally kicks off, after a severed body is discovered inside a train. Reunited by the case, Ousmane and François investigate with the help of a woman named Alice (Izïa Higelin), who sets off both of their boyish inabilities to talk to a woman they find attractive.  

Alice becomes their tour guide of sorts through the town of the crime, a place so conservative that the mayor is a not so thinly veiled fascist. As if the movie is saying, one may not like cops, but at least they’re not out-and-out skinheads who even work at a security company that has a pseudo SS symbol for a logo. Any who, the top half of a guy named Kevin leads to some kind of thing about a super drug, one of many under-cooked story pieces in this messy script from Stéphane Kazandjian. There’s a larger conspiracy at hand, albeit expressed with such touch-and-go ideas that there’s little emotional stakes even when a house for immigrants is targeted for a bombing. 

Taking “The Takedown” on the merits of its two stars, their performances are more or less stapled together by generic buddy-cop comedy banter, including eye-rolling moment when dopey François puts his foot in his mouth regarding his whiteness, the two sharing an awkward beat in which he realizes what stupid complaint he just made about his privilege. It’s not usual a movie with this many car smashes leaves you wanting less action and more talking, but our two heroes who don’t have much of a personality beyond their appearances. For all the movie jokes about Ousmane being a tokenized Black cop, the story then does not give him much of an interior; and for the set-ups with François, it’s jokes about his poor sexual boundaries in the workplace at best. . 

Why are we so enamored with cop stories? Why have we empowered them with being our fantasy action heroes, in turn fetishizing when they have to do things “their own way”? “