Bastille Day (2016)

Bastille Day arrives with the grim efficiency of a film that knows which buttons exist and presses them without conviction. James Watkins directs Idris Elba through a Paris of pickpockets and corrupt policemen, and Elba does what is required of him, which is to stand very still while things explode nearby. Richard Madden scrambles, Charlotte Le Bon broods, and the apparatus hums along at the level of a respectable cable thriller. It is competent. It is also untroubled by the questions it raises and then abandons somewhere around the second act.

Where the film shows a flicker of social awareness, it does so as plumbing. The conspiracy plants false evidence at a mosque and whips up anti-Islamic fury through hashtags, a real and ugly mechanism, deployed here to move bodies toward the Bank of France. The villains are corrupt officials skimming a nation's reserves for themselves, so the robbery critiques greed rather than capital. Zoé and Karen Dacre hold their own as operatives with jobs to do, though the film never pauses to argue the point. It casts capable women and continues.

Everything else is absent. There is no romance of any orientation beyond the conventional, no environmental sermon, no meditation on bodies or brains, no rewriting of the historical record. The film gestures at police violence and the scapegoating of Muslim communities, then hands those gestures to the stunt coordinator. The rest is a serviceable chase through a city that has been photographed better, made by people who understood that a thriller should move and not much else. It moves. Whether it says anything is a question the film declines to entertain, and there is something almost restful in that refusal.