The Wicked Twist Buried in the Otherwise Boring 'Elite Force'

July and August are not a great time in the movie and television reviewing racket. There are typically big movies at the box office, but the release schedule is limited to maybe four or five (and this July has basically been Toy Story 5, Odyssey, and Spider-Man). Television is slow, too — the cutoff for Emmy contenders is May 31st, so July tends toward more frivolous offerings (although Apple TV has been a blessed exception) and reality fare like Big Brother. For someone like me who likes to review or recap seven or eight movies and television shows a week, the pickings are slim, which often means that July is when I watch more Britbox and international fare.

To wit: Netflix’s Elite Force, a French-language action thriller centered on France’s top-tier police unit, GIGN. It is not good. It falls into that Gerard Butler/Jason Statham/Liam Neeson lane, only it’s grim, deadly serious, and written with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the solar plexus. It’s very manly, which is to say: the characters use words, but they may as well just be grunting the whole time.

It doesn’t help, either, that the writing is painfully generic, and the storyline is about as straightforward as it comes. It’s a fastball down the middle with absolutely zero movement, except there’s a wicked last-second twist that I doubt anyone sees coming. It does not salvage Elite Force — far from it, because it is a six-episode slog — but damn, my jaw did drop.

Here’s the quick and dirty: David Berger (Tomer Sisley) is basically in charge of the GIGN. Max (Tristan Zanchi) is a new recruit. David is trying to bounce him out because he’s Max’s godfather, and before Max’s father, Laurent, died, David promised that he’d look out for Max. Looking out for Max means not letting him into an elite tactical force that disarms dangerous bombs once an episode. Alas, Max is too good, and David cannot justify booting him.

I’ll save you all the backstory and just cut to the chase: years ago, David and Laurent were involved in a mission where David survived while Laurent and a little girl died in a bomb explosion. There is some mystery surrounding the circumstances, but the little girl’s dad, Alexis, blames David for his daughter’s death. On the 15th anniversary of Laurent’s death, Alexis comes out of the woodwork, there’s a meetup where Laurent died, and he tries to take out David. It doesn’t work. David disarms him, but because Max is also along for the mission, Alexis gets in a scuffle with Max, and Max kills him.

David wants to take the blame and confess. Max wants to know why. David eventually admits to Max that he’s Max’s biological father. When Laurent was away on a mission very early in his relationship with Max’s mom, Melanie, David and Melanie had sex once. She didn’t even know the baby was David’s until many years later, when they discovered that Laurent could not have a baby. That was the day Laurent found out David was the father, and the day Laurent died in an explosion with the little girl. Max is pissed because everyone has been lying to him his whole life, yadda yadda yadda.

But David is bounced out of the GIGN for his role in the coverup, and Max’s future is very much in doubt. All of this ends up being weirdly good for David, who has gone through a rough patch with his wife and daughter, Jessica and Manon. Being fired from the GIGN means he has more time to spend at home and that Jessica can take a job in Singapore. They’re one happy family again.

That brings us to the final episode, when Amal — Alexis’s widow and the mother of the girl who was killed in the explosion — surfaces. She wants revenge on David for the death of her daughter and her husband. She kidnaps David’s daughter and basically sets up a huge hostage situation. The GIGN comes in to try to save the day, and because David’s daughter has been kidnapped, he forces himself into the mission despite having been fired. Jessica also shows up and waits outside the building in her car, nervous about the fate of her husband and daughter.

Long story short, David and the GIGN do manage to take down all the hostage takers and kill Amal. But Manon is left handcuffed to a bomb with a five-minute timer. The bomb is incredibly complicated to defuse, so David and Max are left with no choice but to cut Manon’s handcuffs and basically run out of the building before it blows. They only have one minute.

While they’re running for their lives, someone else in the GIGN realizes — too late — that all the bombs in the building were dummies. Fake. The target was not David’s daughter, Manon. It was his wife, Jessica. David and Manon look out the window of the building just in time to see Jessica — relieved that David and Manon survived — blow up in the bomb that was placed under her car. She dead. Credits roll.

Again, it’s not a good show. The six episodes feel like 12. The action sequences are not particularly interesting. The characters are so one-dimensional that it’s hard to feel anything besides indifference about their fates. The “I’m your biological dad” twist is boilerplate soap opera material. But I have to hand it to them: the misdirect was sly. If I’d cared anything about Jessica, it might have been devastating. But as it is, it’s still an impressive sleight of hand. Still, a 30-second twist does not justify an otherwise tedious action thriller.