I WAS all ready to dislike French crime drama K.O., a film about a retired MMA fighter tasked with finding the missing son of an opponent he accidentally killed years ago.
Directed by Antoine Blossier, it sees UFC heavyweight Ciryl Gane play Bastien, a reclusive hulk who is given a way to redeem himself by going head to head with a psychotic crime gang in Marseille.
Now streaming on Netflix, it opens with two brutes throwing their weight around in the ring, and showing off their manly prowess. Bruised brick outhouse of a man, Bastien, ends up using a little too much force and accidentally kills his rival Enzo. Broken, he retires from martial arts fighting, and life itself, and hides himself away in the middle of nowhere to lick his wounds.
Years later, Enzo’s widow comes looking for Bastien after her son Léo (Maleaume Paquin) loses his way and becomes caught up in a gang war in Marseille’s underworld. After witnessing a brutal murder, Léo has a price on his head and every hoodlum in the port city is gunning for him.
To clear his debt to Léo’s family, his mother urges Bastien to find her only son, whose life is in real danger.
K.O. is a clunky and rather heavy-handed affair. Ninety per cent of the cast have flat broken noses and big square heads you could hold a banquet on. If it’s beef and brawn you are after, you have come to the right place.
In fairness, Gane, a real-life cage fighter, doesn’t have his acting chops tried too sorely, and for the most part this is a fast-paced and rather inane watch that proved harmless enough.
There’s a lively and well-choreographed nightclub brawl of epic proportions about halfway through, and the film’s leading man comes off more as a gentle giant, than idiotic ogre, unlike our very own dim-witted ‘Notorious’.
(3/5)
