Raid dingue (2016)

(In French, On TV, July 2020) The big-budget segment of French cinema is equally capable of matching Hollywood when it comes to crowd-pleasing crime comedies, and that’s the spirit in which Raid dingue begs to be seen. It’s not meant to be anything but an action comedy, with a heavy emphasis on the comedy. Written and directed by well-known French filmmaker Danny Boon, this is a film about a well-meaning but clumsy woman trying for France’s elite RAID squad (the equivalent of the FBI’s SWAT). There is a criminal gang to provide a true antagonist, a rather annoying sexist subplot to provide romantic tension, and a few montages to show the protagonist going from zero to hero. Alice Pol has a great blend of comic timing and candid attractiveness as the heroine, while Boon gets a plum role for himself as the love interest. The structure of the film will be intensely familiar to anyone who’s seen a handful of Hollywood comedies, but it’s the journey that counts. Here, the results are uneven: While Raid dingue would have been strong enough on its own with a well-meaning heroine, insisting on sexism distracts from the heroine’s own merits. Her clumsiness also seems overdone to the point of being hardly forgivable when it leads to injuries and national peril. Some of this lack of script polish can be blamed on slightly different cultural expectations, but it does damage the film on the way to its conclusion. Still, Raid dingue is an easy watch and a good showcase for Pol. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of mainstream filmmaking in French.