The Crew (Braqueurs)

  Now this is a movie that knows how to get the fuck out of its own way. It starts with someone setting explosives on a manhole in the middle of the woods, cuts to a football game with some of the same people (as the credits roll), then to a scene where a guy asks for more money, and the other guy agrees but "only because you're my brother". You can bet that'll be significant later on. Then you get an amazing armoured truck heist, pulled off with military precision and no loss of life.

 Braqueurs doesn't exactly skimp on crime movie clichés, but it uses them to tell its story efficiently, and give it room to go to some pretty unexpected places. Yanis (Sami Bouajila), a sort of master armoured truck thief, leads the titular crew; His brother Amine (Rédouane Behache) is their gofer, Nasser (Youssef Hajdi) and Frank (David Saracino) act as drivers/muscle, and young Eric (Guillaume Gouix) has just been recruited as the demolitions expert - the very first scene of the movie is his induction test.

 They have a pretty good thing going until the fallout of that first heist hits; Turns out they didn't dispose properly of one of the guns, the one gun that was used (to fire warning shots). That results in some drug traffickers gaining some leverage over the crew, and they use it to coerce the crew to steal a drug shipment from a rival gang.
 Yanis knows that the traffickers will never let them go once they start working for them, so he sets in motion a plan to try and get out of the deal. And going any further would spoil the pleasures of this twisty, unusual crime film, but events end up endangering the families that the film has been carefully introducing in the background.

 The crewmembers are cool and likeable but not necessarily relatable, and definitely not infallible; The acting is solid throughout. There are multiple extended shootouts and the action is of the action/thriller variety, hewing close to its characters with shaky handheld shots; For the most part it does a good enough job establishing where everyone is so that things don't get too confusing.
 Colours tend towards cold blues and greys, not because the palette is desaturated (much), but because of the urban environments most scenes are set against - cinematographer Philip Lozano knows to add some colourful interludes in between as palate cleansers. Palette palate cleansers.

 Director Julien Leclercq (who also wrote, along with Simon Moutaïrou) has done a few of these French action thrillers - I tend to like them, and this one is above average. He's also done some pretty good action movies with both Van Damme and Olga Kurylenko. He's making a remake of The Wages of Fear, which I'd find terrifying if I were him - it's only one of the best suspense movies ever made. We'll see how that goes.