Richard Madden has a nice quality. He was absolutely charming as Prince Charming in Kevin Brannagh’s recent Cinderella, and he exerts the same charm, albeit, a charming charlatan in the bombastic B grader, BASTILLE DAY.
He plays Michael, an American pick-pocket pilfering and purloining in Paris. So charmingly charismatic is he that he also steals the picture from right under its leading man, Idris Elba, who is playing a CIA boofhead called Briar.
A pretty, pretty good petty thief, he gets more than he bargained for when he snatches a bag from a failed mad bomber mademoiselle that has a hard bomb stuffed into a soft toy.
Bomb goes boom, CCTV picks him up as the person who dumped the bag and Michaels criminality quotient rises from tourist targeter to terrorist.
The French cops and security forces want him dead but American blunt instrument Briar wants answers and through his kidnapping and interrogation of his compatriot discovers Michael to be an innocent bystander rather than a bomb thrower.
Indeed the usual suspects of urban bomb outrage seem to the innocent bystanders here, as early in the film, too early, like a monster movie showing the creature too quickly and thus robbing the audience of suspense and the suspension of disbelief, we realise that BASTILLE DAY isn’t an espionage thriller but a rather dull heist caper masquerading as one.
BASTILLE DAY has some snappy dialogue, a fine rooftop foot chase and competent car action, but the faction championing Elba as the next James Bond don’t have a definitive audition here.
Whereas Madden in the next couple of years could be a consideration. Although with all his hankering to join the Agency in this film, maybe he’s a contender for a future Felix Leiter!
Directed by James Watkins, who had a serious success with The Woman In Black, takes the Hammer Studios style of filmmaking and grafts it onto the cop buddy genre in fairly routine and predictable paint by numbers formula.
His and Andrew Baldwin’s script has flashes of sophistication but bubbles away in B grade gear for the most part.
Jose Garcia plays the slick and unctuous villain with Thierry Godard as his gnarly head henchman.
Kelly Reilly is wasted as a CIA station chief and Anatol Yusef plays a Company strategist from Central Casting.
If the film folk are hoping to fashion a franchise from this pairing, it will be thanks to Madden, above all. He is really the only reason – le raison d’etre – that Bastille Day will storm the barricades of the box office.
Blander than Bond, blunter than Bullit, but oh so much better than Butler in the “Has Fallen” batter brained bombast, BASTILLE DAY at least has some impressive travelogue eye candy.
Not mad about the picture, but Madden ’bout the boy.