On February 28, Netflix released a crime thriller with detective elements «Bastion 36» starring Victor Belmondo, the grandson of the legendary French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. The plot of the film is based on the novel «Flic Requiem» by Michel Thurcher. Read the review below to find out what this two-hour movie offers the viewer.
Pluses:
The opening action scene sets the mood for a positive one; the dance soundtrack occasionally dispels the drowsy boredom; a few scenes bring back some tension, but it's short-lived;
Minuses:
Boring narrative with uninteresting function characters; overlong; it doesn't work as a tense police thriller at all;
«Bastion 36» / Squad 36
Genre crime thriller
Director Olivier Marchal
Starring Victor Belmondo, Taufik Jallab, Ivan Attal, Juliette Dol, Soufiane Guerrab, Jean-Michel Correia, Lydia Andrei, Erica Saint
Premiere Netflix
Year of release 2025
Website IMDb
Antoine Cerda, a member of an elite police unit, takes part in underground fights without rules in his free time. After an unpleasant street fight with a vengeful opponent, the fearless fan of the fight club is transferred to a more modest police department in Bobigny. But literally six months later, someone seems to be on the hunt for Serda’s former colleagues — two of them have already been killed, and the third has mysteriously disappeared. The protagonist takes up the investigation of this case, which will lead him to unexpected discoveries.
Former French police officer and now actor, screenwriter and director Olivier Marchal continues to consistently deliver police/crime thrillers with pessimistic noir echoes and a certain insurmountable hopelessness. Here comes the new film «Bastion 36», which is his second consecutive project on Netflix after the series «Blood Coast» (2023), — from the category of those where relations are settled by harsh bearded uncles in black leather jackets with guns in front of them. And the protagonist, despite numerous appeals «not to get involved in this shit», confidently plunges into it headlong.
By the way, the number in the title «36» seems to refer to the best film in Marchal’s career, «Quai d’Orfeo, 36» (2004), which is confirmed by the direct mention of the address of the Paris judicial police headquarters in one of the scenes. However, today’s Marchal is far from his peak form of 15-20 years ago and is content with mediocre genre one-offs on streaming platforms.
At the very beginning, the viewer is offered to witness a chase that unfolds on the streets of the city in the pouring rain. With this gesture, the filmmakers seem to be hinting that we are in for a damn dark and tense movie, and the initial action scene is just a warm-up for the really exciting twists and turns. However, at the stage of its culmination, questions may arise about the logic of the characters’ actions, and «Parisian Drift» will remain the most interesting part of the story.
Everything that happens next is such a boring and drawn-out investigation that the criminals could have already had grandchildren and started playing for PSG. The whole point of the movie is that the protagonist monotonously engages in endlessly long dialogues with various characters involved in the case. And right up until the climax, that’s pretty much all you can expect.
Sometimes Denis Rudin’s camera gets inside a nightclub, and the sound space is filled with dynamic dance music (and this applies not only to «club» scenes), and this could hint at a John Wick showdown. But no — the frame is still dominated by longing and sadness, which is emphasized especially well by Victor Belmondo’s impenetrable stone expression throughout the entire 120 minutes.
At the same time, the cop himself, in the good noir tradition, is morally ambiguous, says little and does a lot of stupid things, leading a completely destructive lifestyle. In Belmondo’s anemic, emotionless performance, he not only fails to evoke empathy, but is rather annoying. Because of this, the final pseudo-dramatic twist runs the risk of passing the viewer by.
What can we say about the other actors — neither Taufik Jallab, who has migrated here from the aforementioned «Blood Coast», nor Juliette Dol, who is required to deliver only a few standard lines and bare her breasts for the camera, nor anyone else is able to be memorable, because they are all purely functional dummies.
Marchal managed to add a bit of political context to his flimsy narrative, which concerns the puppeteers in power and their manipulations aimed at preserving the police’s shining reputation no matter what. But no one is surprised by corrupt cops today, and this aspect hardly brings anything interesting or unexpected to the story.
The local ending is a kind of special kind of cringe because when all the guns finally fire (although this is probably a very loud word), the narrative continues anyway and leads to complete nonsense. Hence, the two hours of running time.
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