What’s the reason we watch movies? Is it to be entertained? To experience art? Or simply to kill time? The answer will differ from person to person, but movies do offer us the ability to experience something someone else is going through. While watching you might recognise something of yourself in a chracter or how you react to events which you normally don’t encounter. Movies also can be a reflection of what is going on in society. It can look at a specific issue (like the use of drones in films like Eye in the Sky and Good Kill) and make the ethical side understandable. It can make us face our biggest fears. Horror movies might be the first thing you’ll think of, but this is also the case with dramatic films. Bastille Day is about terrorism in Paris. After the various attacks all over Europe it’s a sensitive subject, which is why I started to watch this movie with mixed feelings.
Because this is a movie which wasn’t marketed as a drama, but as an action movie starring Idris Elba. A group of men wants to plant a bom in an office (at a moment when no one is there) and decide to use a woman to execute it. She heads to the office, but has doubts when a cleaning crew shows op. She decides to leave, with the bomb which is on a timer. She doesn’t know what to do and as she is thinking about it Michael Mason (Richard Madden) comes across her. He’s a professional pickpocket who sees a big opportunity. He steals the bag and after grabbing the wallet he trhows the rest away. When its contents explode and people die it is his face which shows up in security footage. CIA-agent Sean Briar (Elba) tries to pick him up first, before the French authorities do so. He succeeds, but the two men find out that something big is going on. They are forced to work together and will try to get to the bottom of it in order to stop it.
Alhtough the terrorism aspect of the film actually feels like something which comes across as insensitive, the movie eventually doesn’t go into the direction you might suspect when it comes to the motivation for it. It shifts the focus more towards the job Michael and Sean have to do, who end up in various action filled situations. Elba and Madden make it work. Although Bastille Day is a B-movie, it is one which has some suspense, humor and fun action.
