Le Raid

Djamel Bensalah (2002)

France

Genre: Action

Genre: Comedy

Le Raid, made by Djamel Bensalah in the wake of the success of Le Ciel, les oiseaux…et ta mere, projects a comic multi-ethnic group of banlieue youths into the unfamiliar world of an American-style action-adventure-comedy film. Its plot concerns a group of unsuccessful burglars who find themselves, thanks to a series of mistaken identities, employed as the would-be assassins of a Canadian heiress.  Following her to South America, they are forced to take part in a televised gameshow called 'Le Raid', which involves them in a series of adventures and ends with them winning the game and a large cheque, as well as saving the heiress, thanks to an unconvincing romantic subplot. Shot in CinemaScope on a budget of about £12 million, and produced by Gaumont, with cameo appearances by a number of well-known French stars, Le Raid attracted over a million spectators in France.
    The film draws on spectacular locations and contains an element of reflexivity in its parody of the techniques and (im)morality of reality TV shows. But its misogynist fantasy plot and obsessive toilet humour, combined with its lack of depth of characterisation, result in a film in which the banlieue characters are reduced to stereotypes, divorced from any social or political comment on life in the banlieue.

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