Bronx: Olivier Marchal out of breath (review)
A furious air of déjà vu hangs over this testosterone-charged thriller from the director of MR 73. Released for Halloween 2020 on Netflix, it arrives this evening free-to-air on television.
Bronx did so well on Netflix at the end of 2020 that the director of 36 Quai des Goldsmiths immediately signed with the platform to offer this universe serial. He thus turned Pax Massilia in Marseille immediately, and if it is not quite its sequel, this very muscular show was even more viewed than the film!
Tonight, TMC programs Bronx, in clear, at 9:25 p.m. Here is the review of First.
Pax Massilia: Olivier Marchal, straight to the point (critic)
It's already been 16 years with 36 Quai des Goldsmiths that Olivier Marchal began to impose his mark on the thriller made in France, allowing him to return to the box office heights of which he had been deprived since the 1980s and the Delon-Belmondo rivalry. His cinema, nourished by his own experience as a cop and testosterone-charged as hell, had its detractors, but the greedy sincerity of his gesture was rightly praised by no less than 7 César nominations. Followed MR 73 And The Lyonnais, still in the same style but struggling (already) to renew itself. After a slight step aside with Carbon (thriller inspired by the Carbon VAT scam of the late 2000s), Olivier Marchal reunites with Bronx his favorite playground: this porous border between slightly thug cops and gangsters.
Twelve years later MR73, he places his camera again in Marseille where, after a killing orchestrated by a mafia clan, a cop from the anti-gang brigade and a group leader from the BRB will lead the investigation with methods that are the antipodes and a gaggle of corpses in their wake. From the first minutes, the virile atmosphere and the dominant bluish-grey images remind us that we are on familiar ground. But unfortunately nothing new under the Canebière sun. Betrayals follow betrayals, cheating after cheating, so that each twist quickly ends up arousing indifference and boredom. It goes off in all directions but this thunderous side adds to the feeling of exhaustion aroused by its two long hours, during which the ins and outs of the story completely come to the fore. Its heterogeneous cast (the return of Stanislas Merhar, Lannick Gautry, the rapper Kaaris, Claudia Cardinale, Jean Reno, Gérard Lanvin…) initially arouses a certain curiosity but here too nothing works. Because where Depardieu and Auteuil transcended their roles and took the story elsewhere, this poorly tuned tape tends to weigh it down. The Marchal mechanism is jammed. A definitive end of the cycle?
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