Rogue City aka Bronx in French premiered on 30th October 2020 on Netflix. Directed and written by Olivier Marchal, the film stars Lannick Gautry, Stanislas Merhar, David Belle, Patrick Catalifo, Jean Reno, and Kaaris alongside other cast members.
Good Cop/ Bad Cop
Over the years, good cop/bad cop dramas and shows are one of the most explored categories of any industry. What makes this repetitive category interesting is the moral high ground and degradation the characters hold and how “good wins all”. But Netflix’s latest French action-drama film Rogue City doesn’t bring much with itself.
We enter Rogue City and the first things you hear are gunfire and screams and then you see a brutal man who shoots a dog for doing what is its instinctive nature – barking. Hereafter, we are transferred to 3 weeks later and somehow this previous scene is supposed to give us an idea of what we are to expect.
From the very beginning, the film starts building upon the idea of the good and the bad, all you have to do is to sit through and see things you’ve seen before in twisted ways again. What follows from the very beginning are heroic police missions, corrupt-and-confident cops, honest-and-hated cops/people and the more of the same things.
The film has everything in it that a cliché police-drama would have- a prison, drug syndicate, machine guns, etc. Rogue City will remind you of almost every action-film you might have seen as it has nothing new in it. Netflix, in recent times, has been promoting a lot of French content and while some are actually worth watching, others are just recycled movies about the same thing.
The screenplay of the film fails to hold itself uptight and it is a task to sit through this movie. While the cast does its job well, the character arc is limited and not-so-interesting. You would rather watch any other random police-drama than Rogue City, but if you want to see a naked gangster running and ultimately getting shot, this is your film! The film follows basic cinematography too, which adds to the repetitiveness as a whole.
It is not deprived of fight scenes; you’ll get to see that here and there and but that won’t compensate for the lack of a tight premise. I might as well say that the film lost its essence in translation but even that does not fit here. Rogue City was not lost in translation but was an amalgamation of everything translated from hundreds of movies.
Stream It or Skip It
SKIP IT! Rogue City, from the very moment it starts, fails to keep you engaged or even at the edge of your seat. You just sit there annoyed watching it unfold predictably and in an extremely unwanted manner.
Rogue City is now streaming on Netflix.
Read our other reviews here.