It took two years for the long-suffering French viewing public to get Paris’s most crooked, violent, potty-mouthed and yet raggedly noble cops back on their screens.
Happily, for those of us residing in FX UK Land, the benefit of being so slow to catch onto the grim and gruesome glories of Braquo means the wait for a second series has only been a mere matter of months – certainly not enough time for Eddy Caplan (Jean-Hugues Anglade) and his team from the Hauts-de-Seine PD to mellow with age.
Following their disastrous attempt to spring rotund gangster Serge Lemoine (Alain Figlarz) from prison at the end of Series 1, things are looking horrendously bleak for everyone.
Eddy himself has been kicked off the force for life and is awaiting his trial for corruption in a cell so dirty and death row-like that even the wailing incidental music sounds like a cow being ferried into the slaughterhouse; Walter Morlighem (Joseph Malerba) has moved his wife and kids into a halfway house that makes his erstwhile boss’s bastille look like the Ritz in comparison and is pumping gas at the police motor pool, enduring pitying sneers from former colleagues; and Roxanne Delgado (Karole Rocher) is back in uniform and demoted to working the reception desk, where tedious members of the public stretch both her patience and the subtitler’s skills at translating swearwords to the limit.
‘Piss the hell off!’ she snarls dismissively at a bloke who’s had his car nicked. As for Théo Vachewski (Nicolas Duvauchelle)… well, let’s just say that he won’t be in a fit state to protect and serve for a long time to come.
With Caplan and co out of the loop, and Voglen (Geoffroy Thiebaut) from Internal Affairs all puffed-up and crowing in triumph at his foes’ fate – not to mention looking less like an ageing Draco Malfoy and more like Luke Haines circa Now I’m A Cowboy – it’s down to the tucked-in, bum-fluffed and virtually incorruptible Gabriel Marceau (Samuel Le Bihan) to investigate a meticulously-planned suburban bloodbath that sees twelve members of the public executed and 400 kilos of gold stolen by Jeremy Irons-in-Die Hard With A Vengeance-a-like Colonel Dantin (François Levantal) and his team of ex-military mercenaries.
But with shady officials from the Interior Intelligence department ‘helping out’ the gendarmes and his own officers only able to jam their thumbs into suspects’ bleeding wounds rather than actually find out what the hell’s going on, Marceau needs Eddy Caplan’s help. But what good can a disgraced ex-cop do whilst sitting in jail?
Although the first series of Braquo ended up sagging under the weight of its own tragedy, the essential tenets that kept it from collapsing completely remain in place for this second run of episodes, reenergising the show and propelling it forward: the captivating storyline, the superb and almost hilariously profane dialogue (‘You smell shit and you step right in it,’ Caplan tells Vogel) and the washed-out, grainy visuals that double as a desensitising filter for the endless raft of nightclub toilet sex and brutally bloody street slaughter they depict.
‘You’re the sleaziest bastards I’ve ever met,’ a member of the disciplinary committee tells Eddy, Roxanne and Walter. Absolutely right – and it’s magnifique to have them back.
Airs at 10pm on Sunday 29th April 2012 on FX UK.
> Buy Series 1 on DVD on Amazon.
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