France, Belgium · 2019
1h 38m
Director Fred Grivois
Starring Olga Kurylenko, Alban Lenoir, Sébastien Lalanne, Michaël Abiteboul
Genre Action, Drama, History, War
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In 1976, Somalian rebels hijack a school bus carrying twenty-one French children and their teacher Djibouti City. When the rebels drive it to a no-man’s-land on the border between Somalia and French territory, the French government sends out a newly-formed elite squad to rescue the hostages.
Grivois’ purpose is not to force a conversation about France’s colonial past or a comparison between Africa then and now. As the body count increases in this tense but troublingly context-free drama, he mistakenly believes we’ll gladly put politics aside to revel in the French gift for the kill shot.
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
What we are thus left with is a film that's made with an impressive level of craftsmanship but with exceptionally dubious politics, as if 21st-century moviemaking magic had been let loose on a terribly conservative and hopelessly blinkered 1980s relic of a script.
Los Angeles Times by Noel Murray
This movie is a broadly sketched but illuminating depiction of what happens when powerful nations grow weary of sorting through the subtleties of geopolitics and start letting heavily armed secret agents handle diplomacy.
The action finale, the actual 15 Minutes of War, atones for many of the sins this solid B-picture tallies up until then.
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