REVIEW: ‘Nice Girls’ Finishes Last

Another in a long line of bad Netflix Original action-thrillers, French-language Nice Girls, directed by Noémie Saglio, may have been fine if it weren’t for the incessant jokes about how every joke they make isn’t politically correct. It’s old after the first time, and the gratutiuos amount of it is completely unbecoming. Bad Girls’ action is fine and so are the romances and partnership at the center of the plot. But the crime they’re trying to solve is hard to follow. That is, if you’re even swayed from boredom or muffling your ears from the bad humor long enough to try.

Léo (Alice Taglioni) is a cop with a terrible boss who is investigating the murder of another cop she loved like a brother. And apparently there’s a sniper after her too? Because the murder happened in Germany, a German cop is also assigned to the case by Internal Affairs, who the cast makes fun of repeatedly before we meet them simply because they are German. When that cop turns out to be a Black woman, Mélanie (Stéfi Celma), everybody is thrown off their game.

It’s a basic enemies-to-friends sequence where a few decent action scenes bond the two characters despite their differences and personal squabbles. To make everything worse, this is all happening while Léo is supposed to be assigned to security duty at a big oil summit being protested by a group of young activists that Léo’s boss inexplicably hates.

Léo is also circling the drain on a romance with Bat (Baptiste Lecaplain), who is helping with the investigation, mostly as the man in the chair, essentially. They’re kind of cute, we can give them that. And some of the banter between Léo and Mélanie is pretty endurable, too. But Nice Girls completely falls apart the second you try to follow the plot. Too many bad guys, henchmen, assailants, and allies are in the mix doing too much non-discernible stuff to really bother keeping up with who is who and what anybody’s motives are throughout the movie.

Really, it’s the relationship between Léo and Mélanie and the motivations they reveal over time for wanting to solve this murder that keeps things sort of afloat. But at every turn, crude and senseless attempts at racy humor threaten to drown the whole affair. There is joke after joke after joke about how everything needs to be politically correct. Sometimes, they make jokes that aren’t politically correct followed by jokes about how they should be politically correct. Other times, they just go around complaining about political correctness.

Nice Girls isn’t trying to make a point about anything within the context of the movie itself. It’s all just senseless and bad commentary on the state of society or comedy—or something. It’s in bad taste, constant, and never adds anything but groans to a given scene. The gunfights and hand-to-hand choreography are all decently choreographed, save for one bizarre wire-pulled stunt shot. It’s perhaps a little better than the Netflix average, even.

The scenery is also pretty. There’s a really awkward glare, though, on the windshield of a car in the climactic car chase scene. And the dialogue is filled with expository lines that make it seem like the movie thinks you’re stupid. Bat’s constant accidental innuendo doesn’t really thrill either.

Nice Girls wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for its insistence upon harping on some strange, backward point about political correctness. There’s fun action and fun relationship dynamics. The slightly confusing plot doesn’t really matter in a cheap action thriller like this. It’s just hard to have too much fun when every other line is either bad exposition or bad political correctness humor.

Nice Girls is streaming now on Netflix.