The Crew
Elite soldiers and seasoned criminals know how to breathe under pressure in the cinema of Julien Leclercq. It’s what separates them from everyday citizens and inexperienced combatants who cross their paths in a gunfight or heist. Moments of measured calm preceding volatile action becomes a visual motif for the talented French filmmaker. One incredible example stands out in Leclercq’s oeuvre: Seconds before strapping a pillow to his chest and playing vehicular chicken with an armored truck in The Crew (2015), master thief Yanis (Sami Bouajila) exhales deeply while staring ahead with the keen focus of a shark. The shot seems to last forever.
Honoring the cool-as-a-cucumber tradition of French crime cinema perfected by Jacques Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville, Leclercq’s films are kinetic portraits of professional specialists with personal blind spots. No matter how much firepower or experience they bring into conflict, individual vulnerabilities get exposed. Family members are used as bargaining chips, disrupting the very Zen headspace that usually ensures survival. This tension deepens the emotional stakes at play in a genre not always known for such weighty psychological complexity. But it wasn’t always the case in Leclercq’s early work, which often suffers from the kind of formal and thematic identity crisis that afflicts young filmmakers still trying to find their groove.
Ideologically, Leclercq's films defy the conservative underpinnings of most meathead genre cinema, instead turning a critical eye toward oppressive corporate entities and ethically compromised government institutions. These corrupt forces are not an anomaly that can be defeated, but produce expendable villains or foils symbolic of the devastating greed and inhumanity they represent. Leclercq’s stable of criminals, soldiers, and cops butt up against them in violent fashion because of fate or comeuppance, and are thus forced into a gauntlet defending their family or friends. The impending violence is not overtly political but deeply intimate.
The clunky debut Sci-fi Chrysalis (2007) jumpstarts Leclercq’s fascination with collisions between family and work. Released in the wake of Minority Report (2002), it envisions a near-future in similar gun-metal hues and antiseptic interiors, with clandestine technologies and medical breakthroughs functioning as currency. As Parisian cop David Hoffmann (Albert Dupontel) investigates the murder of a Jane Doe linked to radical memory experiments., Leclercq lays the groundwork for motifs that will later dominate his more brutally efficient work.
The core trauma of David’s life—witnessing the murder of his wife/partner—drives every impulse and desire for revenge. Images and sounds from that horrific experience recur throughout, fueling the film’s examination of loss and letting go. Leclercq’s style features all the film school theatrics of a first timer, but there’s something vital about the way he exposes weaknesses of people who’ve been trained to display none.
The Assault
The Assault (2010) focuses even more rigorously on this idea, foregrounding the real-life story of an infamous 1994 Air France hijacking with special forces soldier Thierry (Vincent Elbaz) experiencing a conflict of duty between country and family. Jumping between suicidal Algerian terrorists, scrambling French bureaucrats, and a stoic Parisian special forces team primed for an incursion, The Assault plays out as a 72-hour standoff between immoveable ideological forces.
Thierry’s wife is often seen struggling to care for their newborn baby alone while he waits idly for orders. Most of The Assault is about waiting, trying to withstand the growing dread that violence will inevitably be necessary. Leclercq isn’t always successful at cross-cutting between these two vantage points, and the film bears little stylistic resemblance to The Crew and later works. That is, until the final shootout set within the cramped interiors of a jetliner cockpit, which becomes a fractured kill zone strafed with shattering metal and perforated skin. Watching Thierry wounded and pinned down by a hail of gunfire, trying to stay conscious as his fellow soldiers clear the plane, is especially upsetting since we know he had ample time to shift priorities. But violence always lures Leclercq’s protagonists away from the mundanity of familial routine, sometimes to devastating effect.
Inert as a crime thriller, Gibraltar (2013) further conflates risking one’s life with freedom. Mired in debt, bar owner and amateur boatsman Marc Duvall (Gilles Lellouche) sees unhappiness on the coastal horizon of Spain’s south coast, which has become a hotbed of drug trafficking in the 1980s. Taking drastic measures to support his wife and newborn, Marc begins snooping on local traffickers who frequent his bar for an ambitious French customs agent (Tahar Rahim). Marc’s involvement eventually grows more dangerous, leading to his wife screaming in protest, “Isn’t our life good enough?” The question is central to the dueling tension that occupies every Leclercq film. Engaging in reckless behavior is never an individual choice, but one that involves (and threatens) the lives of those who matter most.
It’s not surprising that Leclercq’s biopics (The Assault, Gibraltar) are clunky, since the narrative machinations associated with the genre kneecaps even the best filmmakers. Thankfully, he streamlined things with The Crew, a sharp heist film which strips away all unnecessary plot points in favor of a brutally efficient Shakespearean showdown between one close-knit criminal outfit and the street gang that forces them to pull off a brazen robbery.
The Bouncer
The Crew is also the first of now four collaborations between Leclercq and French actor Sami Bouajila, who’s chiseled face and fierce presence represents this transition toward a leaner, meaner cinema. Here, he plays Yanis, an adrenaline junkie that specializes in pulling off ambitious armored car robberies. When his team’s talents are leveraged by a local drug kingpin, family ties initiate a messy entanglement between competing parts of life that are meant to stay separate. The Crew turns it into an organic part of the narrative, weaving multiple storylines in which mothers, sons, and daughters all find themselves in the crosshairs.
This trend is even more concisely expressed in The Bouncer (2018), Leclercq’s most personal film. It stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as Lukas, a former security guard trying to raise his tween daughter while working nightclubs in modern day Belgium. Employing a similar narrative device as Gibraltar, the film introduces a manipulative government agent (Bouajila) who uses incriminating evidence against Lukas, forcing him to help take down drug traffickers operating out of a local strip club.
Utilizing impressive long takes, the film explores subterranean corridors and basements before often breaking out into close-contact fisticuffs. One of Leclercq’s finest authorial moments comes in a fight club-style brouhaha where Lukas must brawl against other beefy applicants to secure employment. Van-Damme’s performance is nuanced and raw, especially when the criminal world scoops up his daughter. Suddenly, it’s not just his life on the line, and The Bouncer turns into an intimately urgent and furious redemption narrative.
Earth and Blood
If The Bouncer maintains an elegiac quality even during its violent climax, there’s no such poeticism in Earth and Blood (2020), Leclercq’s white knuckle masterpiece to date. This down and dirty survival film set mostly in a rustic sawmill resides on the border of horror and action. After one of his young employee’s stashes stolen drugs on his property, lifelong lumber man Saïd (Bouajila) must fend off armed members of a street gang who come to collect.
The first half of Earth and Blood establishes how interconnected family is to each character’s decision-making, then puts them all through a buzzsaw of violence. The sawmill itself becomes another one of Leclercq’s workplace combat zones, as Saïd picks off the intruders in creatively awful fashion. But the brutality directly correlates with his twenty-something daughter’s proximity to danger, and the need to protect her at any cost. “This is a blood thing,” one character says early in the film, referencing how potent revenge and comeuppance can be when family is involved.
While rage organically springs forth during improvisatory acts of violence in Earth and Blood, it’s more of a simmering and calculated emotion during Sentinelle (2021), Leclercq’s harrowing reworking of the neo-Western formula. Olga Kurylenko plays Klara, a special ops soldier reassigned to an overwatch detail in Nice after a suicide bombing decimates her unit oversees. Patrolling beaches and tourist spots numbs her almost as much as the painkillers she’s been prescribed by a military psychologist.
Klara’s professional skillsets aren’t apparent until after her younger sister is brutally raped by a Russian tech magnate with diplomatic immunity. Afterward, Leclercq turns his character loose with Kurylenko displaying a lethal fury that transcends that of any male lead in the director’s filmography. Aside from being an expertly paced action film, Sentinelle also gives a strong female character agency in battling against the corrupt government institutions that protect powerful monsters. And then lets her live to enjoy the bloody closure.
Ganglands
Finally, Leclercq and Hamid Hlioua’s superb television show Ganglands (2021)centers its entire 6-episode arc on the desperate attempts to save friends and relatives from certain death. Bouajila plays another experienced thief named Mehdi who goes to war with brutal drug dealers after they kidnap his niece. In doing so, he inevitably compromises the safety and anonymity of his family and crew.
Like so much of Leclercq’s work, Ganglands features fleet-footed action scenes and high-wire throwdowns with refreshingly tactical blocking. But what sets these impressive set pieces apart is how each character’s wellbeing deeply matters, and how much their teetering safety resonates with classic themes of sacrifice. These cold as ice professionals know that inevitably someone important in their life will be used as a human shield, and the entire world will stop. At that point, all they can do is aim and exhale.