Blood Coast Review 2023 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
During the funeral, the man in shackles, Franck Murillo (Nicolas Duvauchelle), escapes when his people get the jump on law enforcement and ambush them. In the melee, at least one of the cops is killed.
Eight months later in Marseille, a group of cops, led by Lyès Benamar (Tewfik Jallab), is staking out the headquarters of a noted drug dealer who is currently on probation. When a motorcycle pulls up, Benamar and his top team member, Audrey Ilunga (Lani Sogoyou), manage to subdue both the courier and the lookout, but not without some shots fired and someone being hit by a stray bullet. Benamar uses extreme methods to get the courier to tell him who set up the deal, but the guy can only give the name “The Indian.”
Commissioner Fabiani (Florence Thomassin) is not a fan of Benamar’s methods, but also knows he gets results. After her requisite lecture to him about shooting up a tourist spot, she tells him he’s getting a new partner, an Interpol agent named Alice Vidal (Jeanne Goursaud). As she enters the station, she runs into Miranda (Diouc Koma), a colleague who has been sent to Marseille to “clean up” the police force there. He warns her not to get burned by the “unpleasant surprises” the city and its law enforcement has to offer.
Vidal is in the city for personal reasons, though; she’s looking for Murillo, as her father was the one who was killed at that funeral. Murillo is thought to be dead, having been killed on the run in Venezuela. But Vidal has a hunch that Murillo is alive and well in Marseille.
In the meantime, a turf war is starting to build, with “The Indian”, Tarek Hamidi (Moussa Maaskri), working on behalf of Murillo, starts threatening the cousin of Ali Saïdi (Samir Boitard), the local drug kingpin. Benamar gets a tip that something is about to go down, but to his surprise he sees Vidal arrive at the scene on a motorcycle, investigating on her own before her first day on the task force.
Blood Coast has two major issues: Its setup is confusing and none of the characters, whether they’re the cops or the criminals, are particularly distinctive. In a lot of ways, the show reads more like an American network procedural or maybe a standard British crime drama than a prestige series. And that would be just fine if there was anything about any of the characters we gave a hoot about.
Benamar is violent, we get that; he smashes the courier’s head through the car window, then opens the door and pushes his head towards the pavement as the car is moving, just to get him to talk. He’s a bit crooked; he takes most of the money they seized during the raid. Both of those will come into play down the line. But neither he nor Vidal, who are obviously going to be the main players on the police side, seem to be anything but vengeance and violence machines. There may be an attraction that sparks between the two at some point, but there’s nothing about their characters that make us want to root for them.
Murillo seems like a generic bad guy, too. Yes, he has a violent, cunning crew around him, but we need to see more of his backstory, especially with regards to his dead son, to figure out what’s motivating his scorched-earth approach. The burgeoning turf war doesn’t quite jell in the first episode because the players aren’t well defined just yet; we don’t know who is being threatened and why, and who works for which “big bad.”
The team around Benamar and Vidal is so generic we didn’t even mention their names. This just feels like a show that you’ll be into if you want to see a fair amount of violence and chases, but if you want something resembling a story, you might be disappointed.
