R.A.I.D. Special Unit (2017)

R.A.I.D. Special Unit arrives from France with a premise that any studio executive would recognize as a marketing opportunity: Johanna Pasquali, a clumsy young woman, dreams of joining the elite police intervention group RAID, and the men who guard its gates would prefer she did not. Her father, the Interior Minister, quietly arranges her placement, then quietly hopes she will fail. The film is directed by Dany Boon, who also plays the veteran instructor determined to break her. This is a woman-in-a-man's-world comedy, and it knows exactly what to do with that structure, which is to extract jokes from it and move on.

The gender politics are present but unserious. Johanna faces institutional resistance, a skeptical fiancé, and a future mother-in-law who regards police work as unladylike, and the film treats each obstacle as a setup for slapstick. There is no sermon here, no moment where the camera pauses to instruct the audience on the correct position. The film registers on the cultural-awareness meter through its premise alone, then declines to press the issue. The cast is French and white, with one supporting role hinting at a Mediterranean heritage and no comment made about it. Questions of race, sexuality, climate, and the body's relationship to beauty standards go unaddressed. The film has other business to attend to, namely a man falling off a ladder.

The film that remains is a competent mainstream comedy that borrows the vocabulary of empowerment without paying for it. The heroine wins because she is talented and stubborn, which is the oldest story in the genre and requires no ideological apparatus. We assign it a modest score and file it accordingly. It is the cinematic equivalent of a decent Beaujolais: pleasant, unremarkable, and unlikely to change anyone's mind about anything.