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Two years ago, the French action series Furies showed that a series can have great action sequences and a weak story and still work. Now, with the power structure in Paris’ underground having gone through a transformation, the second season of the show is subtitled Resistance.
FURIES: RESISTANCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Scenes from the first season of Furies, which explains that Paris’ top organized crime family, The Olympians, have been destroyed by another group, Damocles. The Furies, who were the enforcers for The Olympians, are now working for Damocles.
The Gist: The domination of Damocles and its mysterious leader Oz is so complete that people who decide to have their own crime-related enterprises do so at their own risk. That’s where Lyna Guerrab (Lina El Arabi) finds herself as she infiltrates a drag racing operation. Damocles wants the leader of the operation alive; they want to get information about his sister, a former operative, who may have seen Oz at some point.
Also dealing with the new normal is Selma aka The Fury (Marina Foïs). They test her loyalty by telling her to shoot three former Furies in the head. One runs from her, she slowly and reluctantly tracks him down, allowing him to die with dignity instead of cowering. She also sees her former fixer, Simon (Steve Tientcheu), working for them.
Selma, though, isn’t interested in working for anyone else, and she knows that the fate of her former enemies, mostly freelancers, is sealed unless they band together and fight. At the same time, Lyna gets the information from the drag race kingpin that Damocles wants; she goes to her former boyfriend, Elie (Jeremy Nadeau), who is a police detective, and tells him that she’ll be an informant for them. Her reasoning is that she’d rather work for the cops than Damocles, but she also wants to get her Furies colleagues out of the police’s crosshairs.
Photo: NetflixWhat Shows Will It Remind You Of? As we mentioned for the show’s first season, Furies could be a Parisian sequel to The Fast And The Furious series.
Our Take: There isn’t much about the story in Furies: Resistance that holds our interest. But the intention of the show, just like in its first season, is to show car chases and shoot-em-up and blow a lot of crap up. In that regard, the show, created by Jean-Yves Arnaud and Yoann Legave, succeeds.
Lyna and her frenemyship with Selma is still at the center of this series, and they’re both after the same thing: The dismantling of Damocles. They’re going to work together with some fellow Furies to make this happen, though it seems that Selma has no idea that Lyna is working for Elie at the same time.
Why the Furies hate working for Damocles, as opposed to The Olympians, is harder to discern. Is it because they’re more ruthless? Do they torture and kill more people? Are they more indiscriminate with their killing? Not a lot that is spelled out in the first episode. In the case of Selma, it might just be that she can’t stomach taking orders from these people. Who knows, really?
What the situation does set up are the aforementioned car-chase, shoot-em-up and blowing-stuff-up scenes that are all well done and take up most episodes’ runtime. Those scenes have more than enough tension to carry those episodes. You just have to suspend any idea that you know or care about what goes on before or after these scenes.
Photo: NetflixPerformance Worth Watching: Marina Foïs continues to be steely-as-hell as Selma, even in moments where she shows a tiny bit of humanity.
Sex And Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: After finding the drag racer’s sister in a Paris hotel, the Furies find out the person who saw Oz was a kid. With Damocles thugs on their tail, Selma sets off a fireball in the hallway (the Furies had doused the hallway with gasoline via the sprinkler system ahead of Selma and Lyna’s arrival).
Sleeper Star: All of the show’s stunt drivers are the sleeper stars here, because the chases are pretty exciting to watch.
Most Pilot-y Line: A side plot where Elie flirts with his police partner while defending himself with his fellow cops after his previous partner was killed just elicited shrugs from us.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Like its first season, you’re likely watching Furies for its action and not its story. The story in Furies: Resistance is even weaker than the story from the first season, but the action sequences are just as fun to watch.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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