“K.O.” is a two-fisted French actioner about an ex-MMA fighter coerced into tracking down the missing son of a man he killed in the octagon.
The fights are as furious as the story is ludicrous.
Long review short, it’s about a Marseilles gang going so far a to shoot and hack its way into a police station to silence an eyewitness to a mass murder. No, that doesn’t scan, add-up or make sense in an ends-justify-the-means sense.
Ciryl Gane of “Den of Thieves: Pantera” is Bastien, a hulking Jack Reacher-sized brawler who bludgeons his way out of a hole to victory in an MMA fight only to have to listen to the cries of his opponent’s wife and son from the arena. Enzo the foe never woke up.
Years later, Bastien is doing manual labor in the South of France, busting rocks on a work crew, when he’s sought out by the dead man’s widow, Emma (Anne Azoulay). Her son, Leo (Maleaume Paquin) acted out on his bitterness and fell into the drug trade. Now, he’s seen something he shouldn’t have –a gangland massacre. An informant for Captain Kenza Alaui (Alice Belaïdi), Leo’s a “squealer” now on the lam from the infamous Manchours clan. Emma wants Bastien to find Leo before the mobs and before the cops — some of whom are sure to have turned.
“His father’s dead because of you,” the widow implores Bastien in French with English subtitles, or dubbed. “You OWE us this!”
That’s how the fighter on a motorcycle runs into the Marseilles native cop Kenza, whose hunch is “The Manchours have moved back in…taken over…neutralized their opposition” in one big massacre. She’s taking all this personally, and that’s what gets her suspended.
“This is police business,” she warns off Bastien.
“That’s not how this works,” he growls. “I’m COMING!”
So it’s a buddy picture, with two mismatched “partners” crashing the clubs — literally — and busting heads left and right as they chase down the missing kid.
The memorable bit here is that club fight. It’s a trendy, popular joint where a link to the missing kid needs to be questioned. And the bouncers in this Marseilles nightclub, dressed in matching white suits with dark open-collar shirts, put life and limb on the line to toss this mouthy, short cop and the He-Man she brought along as muscle. The fight starts and ends, and starts again. And again.
It’s Marseilles. Isn’t there better paying/less dangerous work with smugglers, drug gangs, dock gangs and human traffickers? Or are all those Around the World with Netflix action pix lying?
None of it makes any more sense than the damned sex/love interest shoehorned into the proceedings, or the “Let’s solve all our problems by killing the cops investigating us” climax.
Gane is a magnetic, WWE-sized presence, and Belaïdi is properly fiesty. The kid’s a wash and the villains mostly a generic ethnic mob. Writer-director Antoine Blossier’s narrative takes the time to torture one of the principals, The Andalou (Affif Ben Badra) without adequately building up the character into anybody we’re supposed to pay attention to.
The whole picture plays like that, struggling to squeeze in characters without character development, lost when it isn’t putting Gane through his paces in the sometimes over-the-top brawls.
Rating: TV-MA, graphic bloody, violence
Cast: Ciryl Gane, Alice Belaïdi, Maleaume Paquin, Anne Azoulay and Affif Ben Badra
Credits: Scripted by Antoine Blossier. A Neflix release.
Running time: 1:26
