Final Rating: 1.5/5
Attack on Paradise, playing at Fantasia Festival, is an action thriller film, from director Bob Colaers, pitting an ex-con and a rookie cop against a drug lord’s gang, conveniently holed up in one apartment. The movie takes inspiration from other martial-arts and shoot-em-up focused infiltration thrillers like The Raid and Dredd but lacks the clear visual style and action choreography that makes those films work.
In Paradise, a man named Suleyman (Saïd Boumazoughe) goes to visit his mother after seven years in prison. While he’s there, the apartment – now owned by a drug kingpin named Prince – is raided by a SWAT team. As the property descends into chaos, Suleyman is forced to enter the fray when his mother’s nurse asks him to get insulin from her room on another floor.
Suleyman is a badass, as characters regularly remind the audience. Enforcers at the apartment building are honoured to meet him, and brag to their friends about his past accomplishments. Once he starts gunning for Prince, several henchmen get some variation of the line “oh, you’re in trouble now.”
That said, you’d hardly know Suleyman is a threat from Boumazoughe’s performance. He spends the first third of the movie avoiding fighting. When he’s finally face to face with the bad guys, most of that time is spent sneaking or running through the apartment complex. Suleyman only has two notable fights, and one of them is mostly him getting pummeled by someone who clearly outclasses him.
It doesn’t help that his sidekick, Yasmine (Clara Cleymans), is a rookie cop on her first raid. While she’s not completely helpless, her lack of combat experience means that her few fights are pretty dull.
In great action movies, a fight can be a potent storytelling device. It can even be a story in and of itself, with the best choreographers able to use combat to construct mini-narratives complete with themes and three-act structure. The fights in Paradise lack that depth, often amounting to one-sided beatdowns eventually resolved by a lucky break.
One of Prince’s enforcers is brought down when she trips backwards onto sharp bamboo. Another fight resolves when Suleyman – on the brink of death – randomly enters a kind of flow state and just stops being hit.
If the film as a whole were more chaotic – or even more action-focused – the weaker fights might not stand out as much. Unfortunately, the filmmakers regularly undercut opportunities for action. During the initial push by the SWAT team, most of the apartment complex’s enforcers are taken out by snipers from a distance. Once the threat to the gangsters is made clear, a big group of bodyguards exit the building, only to be swiftly gunned down.
The police in Paradise are ruthlessly efficient at extrajudicial killings from a distance, but that efficiency doesn’t extend to close quarters. As soon as the SWAT team enters the building, they are trapped in a basement and rapidly dispatched until only Yasmine remains. The effect of all of this is to take out 90% of possible combatants before any combat can happen in the first place.
Paradise isn’t all bad. The techno soundtrack by Maxim Lany and Jonas Nuttin is catchy. Steven Vanvolsem’s cinematography overuses Dutch angles to a comical degree, making the movie a lot of fun to look at. But while the film isn’t totally inept, it is inert. For an action movie, it feels void of momentum, and the dramatic writing isn’t interesting enough to sustain the downtime between fights.
Attack on Paradise was seen during the 2026 Fantasia Festival. Thank you Fons PR for the screener.
