A gunshot. A dog barks. Another gunshot. Another round is loaded into the gun. Frantic footsteps. A woman screams in horror. A third gunshot. The dog barks again. But this time the woman’s screams are not heard. All of this takes place completely in the dark.
This original, mysterious prelude—a story communicated to us not through sights but through sounds—is how the Netflix film Rogue City opens. Not to worry, though—this is a film, after all, not a radio show—and so we are quickly returned to the domain of the visual. And once we are, we are taken inside a modest-sized house on the sea, where we’re greeted by a blond-haired, blue-eyed, shaggily-bearded man bearing a shotgun and aiming it a whimpering dog. The dog soon meets the same fate that the invisible woman met in the film’s prelude. And so too—after a moment of reflection while looking out onto the tranquil skies and calm seas—does this clearly troubled man, at his own hands. What have we just witnessed?
In order to make sense of all this, we’re taken three weeks back in time, where a handcuffed, white-bearded, suavely dressed man—Paul Maranzano (Gérard Lanvin), dressed and coiffed here in a way that lends him a passing resemblance to The Most Interesting Man in the World—is being escorted out of a French prison and into an SUV by a group of heavily armed men.
“So, you’re Vronsky?” he asks one of the armed men once he’s safely inside the car, adding—as if anticipating our own question—“Did you steal that name from Tolstoy?” As they begin a conversation about Anna Karenina, discussing the merits of novel’s titular character’s decision to throw herself onto the train tracks after a doomed love affair, we catch a brief glimpse of the man with the long blond hair from the opening scene—Willy Kapelian (Stanislas Merhar)—who here is sitting in the front passenger’s seat and overhearing the conversation about one of the most famous suicides in literature. Now we can begin to trace the integuments—or so we think—of the thematic connection writer-director Olivier Marchal is setting up between the film’s prelude and this still unknown, clearly troubled character.
Before he is to be led off to his eventual destination, the prisoner has one request of Vronsky (Lannick Gautry): to be taken to the nearby hospital, where he can see his terminally ill wife one last time. After a fairly unemotional farewell to his dying wife, we’re taking into a facility that looks more like a high school locker room than the police precinct it’s purported to be. A new police chief is set to assume command over the squad the next day—Ange Leonetti, who, one of the crewmembers informs the others, was one of his old crime bosses.
The following day, a small gathering by the sea is held to welcome the new police chief of Marseille—“a city we adore,” says the man introducing him, “but a city that can be dangerous, as we all know.” Hailed as an “extraordinary cop” of “unparalleled integrity,” we at last get to meet the new chief, Ange Leonetti, who is played by the legendary French actor Jean Reno, who has some of the best crime film bona fides (Léon: The Professional; Ronin; the first Mission: Impossible) of any actor one could hope to find. The straight-laced, Bible-quoting Leonetti pledges to fight crime in the southern French city with what he says are the three essentials of police work: “Humility, honour, and honesty.” The question, however, becomes whether his corrupt squad will play along with his high-minded ideals—and whether he will live up to them himself.
Their first order of business is investigating a recent shooting at a bar, with the goal of identifying the contacts of the perpetrators and neutralizing whatever other racketeers and drug-traffickers are connected to them. After that, though, the proceedings start to become a little hazy. There’s a funeral that’s interrupted by impromptu arrests, a man and woman in an office for some reason discussing the subject of affairs, a scene involving Paul at the tomb of his son, a man shot in front of his seven-year-old son (why? and by whom?), a bullet-ridden confrontation over a drug shipment being brought in by boat at night, a phone-call death-threat sent to a policeman (from who? on account of what?), an argument between two policeman over a watch found on the beach after the drug shipment shootout (why is this watch so important? and why are they being so contentious about it?), a dispute over money between two other cops (drug money?), and confabs over someone named Nadal (not the tennis player). We need subtitles that not only translate this French film into English but that also parse the translated English into a semi-comprehensible plot.
As a crime/action film, Rogue City, originally titled “Bronx,” adheres to many of the conventions of its genre, featuring its fair share of shootouts, drive-by shootings, retaliation shootings, violent interrogations, vicious chokeholds, near-rapes, near-beatings with baseball bats, blood-soaked victims, and other sundry spectacles of cinematic brutality. To be sure, most of these tropes are to be expected when watching a crime film. Some of the conventions, though, be they crime-thriller specific or filmic in general, I could have done without. Do we really need yet another scene in a movie or television show of a phone ringing while a couple is having sex where the woman implores her partner not to answer it and yet he goes ahead and picks up the phone anyway? Or the shootout where for some reason the director feels the need to do something showy with the sound-mixing or camera movements in order to heighten the drama and accentuate the action; isn’t a shootout involving multiple drug gangs with automatic weapons dramatic and action-filled enough? And, although not necessarily a filmic or crime-drama convention, I’m not sure we needed a gunfight involving a fully naked man either.
The film also takes too long to wind its way back to Willy. An hour passes before we actually begin to learn anything about him— for example, that he is married with two small children and his wife is planning on leaving him. “My father told me to never marry a cop or an asshole,” she complains to one of his colleagues. “And I married someone who is both.” But by the time the action returns to him we’ve almost forgotten about him, and the movie’s inventive, understated prelude has at this point been overpowered by much louder and brasher scenes and by a plethora of settings and situations and faces and players that we need a scorecard to adequately keep track of. And the ending? Oh boy. I will not spoil it in case you do actually want to consume this undercooked film, but let’s just say it appears as if Marchal grew as frustrated writing this movie as we have been watching it and decided to simply be done with it and move on to other projects, in the same way that after watching Rogue City we’ll be looking forward to moving on to other, more rewarding films and television shows in our viewing lives.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer, rabbi, and scholar from western Massachusetts. He holds a Ph.D. from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and studied English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University. A former contributor to the Books & Arts section of The Weekly Standard and a current Washington Examiner contributing writer, he is the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life. In 2021-22 he is serving as a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Systematic Theology at the University of Salzburg. His next book–Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America–will be published in 2023 by the University of Alabama Press.