Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Squad 36’ on Netflix, a Gritty But Frustrating Hard-boiled French Corrupt-Cop Thriller

If you have a hankerin’ for grim faces that need a shave, French good-cop/bad-cop drama Squad 36 (now on Netflix) may scratch that itch. Its director, Olivier Marchal, cranks these hard-bitten movies out like mad, and this one follows a troubled young cop (of course he’s troubled!) as he manages a demotion and navigates a rather twisty investigation into, hey, guess what, Corruption Within The Force (a clearly troubled force!), after his former squadmates (all troubled!) start turning up dead. And yet, for those of us keen on complicated plots spiced with action and heaping piles of brooding, these movies tend to be pretty good for the most part – so let’s see if this one passes muster, or if it’s just, you know, troubled.

SQUAD 36: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with a little cat-and-mouse in a raining-buckets storm. Antoine (Victor Belmondo) and his cop compadres Hanna (Juliette Dol), Sami (Tewfik Jallab), Richard (Soufiane Guerrab), Vinny (Guillaume Pottier) and Walid (Yousef Ramal) have me wondering if six people can by-definition triangulate on a Person of Interest, but suffice to say they’re enacting some type of -angulation on Karim (Jean-Michel Correia). Once Karim realizes he’s being eyeballed, a not-quite-a-car-chase-but-more-of-a-car-pursuit ensues, and becomes a pretty slippy motorcycle chase on some rather sloppy-wet pavement. The point is for the cops to not raise a stink as they tail the guy, who they failed to bring in, by the way. But enough of an odor is raised – motorcycle went crash – to result in public complaints to the department, which doesn’t make the boss Balestra (Yvan Attal) happy because apparently his entire job is to spin and twist and manipulate to make sure the police department doesn’t look like a bunch of incompetent assholes. 

At this point we learn almost just enough about Antoine to care about his well-being a bit: He and Hanna are a couple, and she smiles in his general direction in a rather fetching manner – until he goes off to be Nighttime Antoine. See, he moonlights as a bareknuckle fight-clubber, taking on stinkin’ criminal pusbags who want to take a shot at a cop. But Antoine is a badass who can take a hard punch and then deliver two harder ones. He splatters a guy, collects his cash, is jumped outside by the splattered guy and his two pals, and Antoine splatters the guy again and his two pals. This is enough of a public incident for Balestra’s superiors to put the screws to Antoine, who’s kicked down the ladder and his department is dissolved. Antoine responds by fight-clubbing it again, and getting his ass beat like several drums.

Six months go by. I’m not quite sure what Antoine’s doing – the movie tosses a barrage of interdepartmental cop lingo and acronyms at us and I didn’t have a spreadsheet handy to sort it all out, but I assure you, our guy is somewhere between being a meter maid and police commissioner. He and Hanna ain’t a thing no more – he stopped responding to her calls, and didn’t talk to any of his old friends despite the fact that they all showed him love and support and drank the night away when he got transferred. But now they’re turning up dead. There’s Vinny’s body, and now Walid’s, and strangely, Richard is missing. Even though the boss’ boss, Wagner (Lydia Andrei), warns Antoine to keep his nose outta this shit, he pokes around anyway, and soon pulls a string that starts to unravel a web of lies and deceit and fibbery and corruption and all the things that make bad cops bad. Will Antoine eventually have to TURN OVER HIS GUN AND BADGE? Does the Pope wear a funny hat? HEY, NO SPOILERS!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: So I says to myself I says, didn’t Marchal direct another one of these wiggle-wormy cop thrillers for Netflix? Indeed: 2020’s Rogue City. I refreshed myself by reading its IMDb one-line summary: “Caught in the crosshairs of police corruption” (sound familiar?) “and Marseille’s warring gangs” (only one gangster in Squad 36 tho) “a loyal cop” (Antoine’s primary trait is loyalty to the force!) “must protect his squad” (squad! The word’s right there!) “by taking matters into his own hands” (and here I’ll paraphrase myself from a paragraph ago: boss says stay out, pokes around anyway). Therefore, Squad 36 reminds me of Rogue City.

Performance Worth Watching: Belmondo sure can brood with the best of the stubbled, troubled-cop masses. One senses he’s capable of more than Squad 36 gives him, but c’est la vie.

Memorable Dialogue: This script is full of rock-hard-boiled lines like “Sense? Fifteen years in policing taught me there’s no such thing in human behavior” and “What kind of trouble?” “TROUBLE” and “Management prefers a dead cop over a corrupt one, as you know.”

Sex and Skin: Brief topless-lady nudeness.

Our Take: How much can one rummage around in the ethically murky motives of power-warped cops before we get bored? A fair amount, if the rummaging is done right, and Marchal comes tantalizingly close to stirring the ingredients of intrigue into a hearty stew with Squad 36. Now, I have a proclivity for shrewdly directed, no-frills procedurals with a bevy of mini-twists adding up to one big conspiracy – you just dive in and hang in there through the confusing bits and an overabundance of supporting characters who all kinda look alike (stubble, hair that needs washing, a scar or two, drab clothes, etc.), trusting that this is a good one that will bring it all together coherently at the end. Squad 36 mostly does that, sorting and sifting down to the primary idea at the heart of the screenplay, leaning on how Belmondo’s dark, violent side balances out his optimistic morality.

Problem is, Marchal comes out guns blazing with a ripping opening action sequence, shows us his protagonist’s capacity for being a tough mofo that’s like a more grounded and plausible John Wick, then spends the rest of the two-hour run time not capitalizing on that setup. The film’s subsequent fights, shootouts and chases are boilerplate fodder playing second banana to a plot that’s ultimately too familiar, and features one-to-three twists too many — not to mention failing to show us the hero’s goosebump-raising capacity for martial-arts kickassery beyond the opening few scenes. Why establish the character in this way without following through with it?

The core idea here is a light meditation on misguided loyalty with a big fat punchline: Cops can rot. It’s a disappointingly simplistic and deeply cynical conclusion that arrives in the final 10 minutes to frustrate and depress us, to have-a-nice-day us right out the door with a bad taste in our mouths. And it doesn’t put enough meat on Antoine’s character bones so our emotional attachment to the guy can transcend the meta-feelings we have about having watched a lengthy, bleak procedural thriller all the way to the end only to have it punch us in the liver.

Our Call: Hashtag Squadgoals: SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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