AKA (2023)

AKA arrives from France with the modest ambition of an undercover thriller and the modest budget to match. Alban Lenoir, who co-wrote the script with director Morgan S. Dalibert, plays Adam Franco, a special ops operative who burrows into a crime syndicate and, as these things go, develops a soft spot for the boss's stepson. The film knows its genre well. It hits the beats in order, and the critics were right to note that it innovates in none of them. What it does have is moody cinematography and a score that pushes the thing along, which is more than many of its peers can claim.

The social consciousness here is present but light on its feet. The cast includes several Black actors in substantial roles, though their presence flows from the international crime premise instead of any casting mandate. Women appear as a mole, a fellow agent and a teenage sister, all of them serving the machinery of a male-driven plot. The film's final twist, in which the French state has framed a South Sudanese man as a terrorist to bury a senator's foreign entanglements, gestures toward state violence and its colonial residue. It plays as a thriller reveal, not a thesis. The villainy being indicted is governmental, not financial, so the wealthy escape the knife.

There is no courtship of environmental themes, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent characterization, no reworking of the historical record. The message, such as it is, arrives through gunfire and a front-page headline. A competent, familiar, faintly indignant entertainment, and little more.