'AKA' (2023). Netflix Movie. Review: French style "Badass"

AKA is a French-style gangster thriller that has its main appeal in showing Eric Cantona playing a Scarface. Too bad he isn’t up to it.

AKA is a French film directed by Morgan S. Dalibert starring Alban Lenoir and Eric Cantona. Yes, the one from Manchester United.

About the movie

Bad guys, very “badass” in a movie that Guy Ritchie would have done much better.

The star this time is not Cantona, featured almost as a commercial claim for the film, but this actor called Alban Lenoir who, with his very manly features, fits the role to perfection … A quite different matter is if the role is worth it or if the movie has enough dramatic intensity to demonstrate anything beyond knowing how to hold a gun (there are others in Hollywood who do not even know how to do that).

As for the Movie: zero sense of humor in a film that takes itself too seriously and offers us a classic thriller that is confined to the master lines of the genre without contributing almost nothing (perhaps nothing at all).

A very dark film that clearly moves away from the Hollywood style and is much closer to the French thriller of recent years, but without standing out at all. At the same level of the bunch of the like that are yearly made in America and that go without a fuss or just keep the premiere low key.

It is a movie that makes no concessions to dramatism, that’s for sure: it is rough, dry in its treatment and interpretations and, like Cantona with his son on the screen, it does not give an inch to sentimentality.

It sticks to telling the story of an insider, it limits itself to doing it very diligently, but it is soon forgotten, even before the film is over.

It entertains, yes. Does it delight or thrill? Not too much.