Saw this at the Imagine 2024 film festival in Amsterdam. Apart from good casting/acting and an implicit tour through many areas in Dakar, this appears to be a standard action movie, of which we have seen more than enough. However, if we had known from the start of the devious scheme behind it all, we might have valued the proceedings more ("enjoy" would be a misnomer, given the background story and the violence overload).
More background would have allowed us to live along with the two main protagonists. But we know nothing, neither about the underlying setup nor the purpose of their so-called missions. Nor do we know who the two bomb-chained men are. The bombs had a 10-hour times display perfectly in view, visibly counting. That was the only thing obviously clear throughout. And there was a voice in their earpieces telling them what to do (and what to do not).
Before knowing the purpose of it all, it is merely a series of useless violence and car/scooter chases while traversing Dakar, just like a standard action movie. If you're a fan of that, be my guest, but it does not work for me. There is no clear goal that must be reached within 10 hours, and the intermediate assignments they received did not help us getting in the proper mood. There was nothing that did help us outguess what was going on. In the process, we met a series of side characters, but nothing was told how they fit in the grand scheme. For a movie marked (among others) as Thriller, such ingredients are dearly missed.
Worse, we had a confusing, relatively short intermezzo, marked "Los Angeles 2 weeks ago" in yellow letters before that scene started, where we saw the two same men with the same ticking bombs. It seemed like a break in the narrative and unconnected with the story, were it not that the strategy of cutting wires is discussed. I'm at a loss how this can fit in the story line, being far away from Senegal.
But there is a plan, alas not made known to us until the finale. Soon after that revelation, it is implicitly suggested that a similar setup will be executed in Paris soon after, all of that with the sole purpose of raising an upheaval with enormous political consequences. Not until that moment, it became clear why two American citizens, unmistakenly looking like Americans, were chosen for the "missions" they had to carry out. It is indeed a devious schema, causing lots of political turmoil. To conclude: an unforgivable narrative failure.
