Bastille Day, released as The Take in North America and on home video, is a 2016 action thriller co-written and directed by James Watkins, the filmmaker behind Eden Lake, The Woman in Black and more recently Speak No Evil. Running 92 minutes, it stars Idris Elba as CIA agent Sean Briar, Richard Madden as Michael Mason, an American pickpocket working the streets of Paris, and Charlotte Le Bon as Zoe Naville, with Kelly Reilly in support. When Mason lifts a handbag without realising it contains explosives, the resulting blast makes him the most wanted man in France, and Briar pulls him into uncovering a far larger conspiracy behind the attack.

I want to begin with the question that occupied a genuinely unreasonable portion of my viewing. Why did these characters have to be American? Consider the arrangement. Idris Elba is English. Richard Madden is Scottish. The film is set entirely in Paris, produced substantially by French and British companies including StudioCanal and TF1. Every ingredient here points toward a British story. Put them in MI5. Fly them over from London. The plot would function identically, the geopolitical friction would arguably be richer, and it would have spared Richard Madden ninety-two minutes of visibly wrestling an American accent into submission. You can hear the labour in every line, and it drew my attention away from the film again and again.

I should also be honest about my bias, which runs strongly in the film's favour. I am a considerable Idris Elba fan. I will watch essentially anything with him in it for no reason other than his presence, and I know for a fact he can carry a police officer, because Luther is one of my favourite shows and he is magnificent in it. This is not that. Parts of Bastille Day are genuinely painful and other stretches are simply boring. That is not a failing on his part. Contemporary reviews noted that Elba shoulders this film so effortlessly you sense he could take on a great deal more, and I agree entirely. He is doing excellent work in service of something that does not deserve it.

Interestingly, the standout for me was Zoe. This is a character who very nearly destroys a building, and yet she is entirely unafraid to get physically involved, and across the film she achieves considerably more than Madden's character manages. She has agency, momentum and a genuine arc, while the nominal co-lead spends much of the runtime being dragged from location to location.

Two production oddities left me genuinely puzzled. During the rooftop chase, which is otherwise one of the better staged sequences in the film, the stunt double's face is fully blurred out. Not concealed by a clever angle or obscured by the environment, simply digitally smudged, while we are asked to accept that we are watching Idris Elba. Separately, the opening scene involving a woman getting out of bed features an equally conspicuous blur across the lower half of the frame. Taken together, I do wonder whether the version I watched was a censored cut prepared for broadcast or a particular platform, because the second blur in particular has that quality about it. Either way, both were distracting.