The Takedown Review: Louis Leterrier’s Policier Blithely Traffics in Dubious Comedy

After the upper half of a corpse is discovered at a Paris train station early in Louis Leterrier’s The Takedown, detectives are led to a small town in Southeast France where a white supremacist terrorist group has set up shop. That’s not exactly a setup that begs for comic broad strokes, but Stéphane Kazandjian’s tone-deaf screenplay will surely leave audiences wanting for at least a sophistication of wit.

Sure, jokes are made at the expense of the film’s neo-Nazis, who are pumped up on the same methamphetamine concoction supposedly used by the German Nazis. But racist and homophobic humor also creeps up throughout, and constantly undermines The Takedown’s supposedly inclusionary, pro-immigrant messaging every step of the way.

At the helm of the grisly case are two mismatched police officers: the impulsive, unmanageable Ousmane (Omar Sy) and the slick, arrogant François (Laurent Lafitte). After the bottom half of the corpse is eventually discovered, the duo are repeatedly grossed out by the victim’s penis during an examination in the morgue. And their misadventures only get increasingly cringe-worthy from there as they go on to battle for the affections of a female colleague, Alice (Izïa Higelin). Later, François ogles a married woman while she’s showering and makes cracks about not understanding Ousmane because he “doesn’t speak African.”

That any of this could pass for comedy in 2022 only begins to make sense if the viewer knows that The Takedown was spawned by the same mind that brought us the post-American Pie dreckfest Sexy Boys. Indeed, the same puerile—and impossibly dated—humor that informs that film’s cum-in-pasta scene undergirds just about everything here, from the bizarre slapstick sequence in which chickens flutter indoors as the victim’s mother learns of her son’s death, to a scene where Ousmane and François are forced to share a queen-sized bed.

This stripe of comedy would feel less distasteful if it weren’t couched by the filmmakers within a policier that addresses the fascist, xenophobic, and nationalist forces reshaping France, as well as America. Of course, it’s no surprise that The Takedown is ultimately using this scenario as nothing more than an empty nod to something topical, as it never generates any dramatic weight behind the central mystery or the odd-couple bickering between its main characters. Like the film’s constantly swooping camera movements, everything in The Takedown seems explicitly designed to distract audiences from how aimless the whole affair is.