ANDREW BALDWIN

BASTILLE DAY (2016)
Starring Idris Elba, Richard Madden, Charlotte Le Bon, Kelly Reilly and Jose Garcia. Directed by James Watkins.

On the eve of Bastille Day, a young French woman, Zoe Naville, slips across Paris with the intent of planting a bomb to make a radical political statement but means to kill no one. At the last moment, she decides that she cannot commit this violent act.

Michael Mason, an American pickpocket, steals Zoe’s bag, keeps what he can use and throws the rest away into a garbage bin next to a busy Metro stop. At the same time, inside the ultra-secure CIA Station in Paris, Sean Briar, an agent brought in from the battlefields of Syria and Iraq in the wake of a mission that has gone terribly wrong, struggles to adjust to his reassignment as a desk-bound data analyst: a misfit real warrior in a world of cyber counter-terrorists.

When the bomb goes off, Michael becomes the only suspect. Briar is determined to find him and bring him into custody before the French authorities do.

From then on, Briar, Michael, and Zoe will be bound together in a 24-hour suspense ride across the city, in a frantic attempt to expose a conspiracy of chaos and greed that only they can prove.

REVIEWS Bastille Day - Idris Elba's realistic action drama