Summary
You’ve seen everything Blood Coast has to offer before, and likely done better than it is here, but if you’re in the market for a serviceable crime series you don’t have to think about too much it’ll probably scratch an itch.
With the recent news that Netflix has already renewed Criminal Code for a second season, it’s obvious that the streamer has quite an appetite for international cops and robbers stories. The good news is that Blood Coast (originally titled Pax Massilia) is another. The bad news is that it has none of the forensic detail or smart construction of Criminal Code. Instead, it’s a generic mashup of The Shield and Narcos, though nowhere near as good as either.
Blood Coast Season 1 review and plot summary
The basics are simple enough – Franck Murillo (Nicolas Duvauchelle) is a very bad guy making a serious play on Marseille’s criminal underworld as revenge for the death of his son. Lyès Benamar (Tewfik Jallab) is a sort of bad guy but he has a police badge so he’s nominally the hero. Benamar’s team of classic crime show archetypes skim money from drug busts, rough up suspects, and generally have enough of a good time that Internal Affairs, represented here primarily through one guy named Miranda (Diouc Koma), are all over them.
This recipe for obvious calamity is made more combustible by the arrival of Interpol agent Alice Vidal (Jeanne Goursaud), who has a history with Miranda and a deeply personal grudge against Murillo, who was responsible for the death of her father. Once Murillo’s right-hand man, “The Indian” (Moussa Maaskri), starts putting pressure on the local Saidi crime family, its kingpin Ali (Samir Boitard) returns to France to put a stop to the hostile takeover.
If you think this sounds a little complicated, you’d be right. Blood Coast has a fundamentally simple premise presented in the most needlessly complex way possible. The opening episode is a flurry of shootouts, maiming, and police brutality that drops so many names and teases so many conflicting motivations that I thought I’d accidentally pressed play midway through the series.
RELATED: Will there be a Blood Coast Season 2?
The irony is that basically every major character has deeply personal reasons for being involved in the plot but none of them ever seem like three-dimensional human beings. I do not subscribe to the silly belief that all protagonists should be good, likable, or even relatable, but I think they should be interesting. Nobody here is. Everyone’s just a catalyst for more action, more plot; they don’t drive the story but are instead dragged along by it, usually hanging out of a vehicle with their head close to the asphalt like one of the gangbangers Benamar interrogates.
Almost as if it knows it’s largely uninteresting, Blood Coast uses violence as a shorthand for maturity and facile action as a substitute for excitement and tension. There’s a slightly sadistic quality to it all that feels a bit juvenile in its execution, and when everyone on both sides of the moral divide seems to get off on torturing and killing almost everyone they meet, it’s difficult to buy into the idea that there’s any pleasure to be taken in one side or the other emerging victorious.
If this is the point, and I concede it might be, then the show doesn’t do a very good job of exploring it. At just six episodes, each running under an hour, there isn’t much time for things other than action set-pieces and very loaded conversations about whatever horrible thing is going to happen next. With the line between heroes and villains so blurry, it’s just difficult to care either way, and Blood Coast doesn’t seem especially interested in convincing us that we should.
You’ve seen it all before
Blood Coast is, to be charitable, an easy binge-watch, and it’s never boring, though it isn’t particularly interesting either. This is the kind of show that genre fans will gobble down without much fuss and promptly forget about; it’s enjoyable in the moment without leaving any lasting impressions. One might argue this is enough, and for many perhaps it will be. But those expecting something more than the bare minimum will likely leave disappointed.
What did you think of Blood Coast Season 1? Comment below.
