Ciryl Gane is a French mixed-martial artist or MMA fighter, born in 1990. He started out in Muay Thai, but he's 6-foot-5 or nearly two meters and over 240 pounds or 112 kilograms. He's been fighting as a UFC heavyweight champion since 2019. He fought Derrick Lewis in 2021 and Jon Jones in 2023. However, like Randy Couture, Georges St-Pierre, Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor, Gane joins a long list of UFC athletes-turned-actors. Gane started appearing in TV shows and films, mostly on Netflix, starting in 2021. He appeared as himself in a French MMA series The Cage (2024) in which he hosted a podcast based on his UFC nickname "Bon Gamin." He had a small role in his first mainstream, Hollywood film Den of Thieves: Pantera (2025). It seems he has skills and talents outside the MMA cage, which probably explains why he was given this leading role so quickly.
Gane stars as Bastien, a MMA fighter living in Marseille, a city in the south of France. Obviously, playing a MMA fighter isn't a stretch for Gane, and not much is revealed about his character, except that his father died when he was a teenager. Otherwise, we learn nothing else about him. He doesn't seem to have any friends or other family of note. He basically lives as a recluse in what looks like a shack in an area outside the city. He works as a day-laborer, swinging an axe as part of a construction or demolition crew. He doesn't interact with any of his co-workers. He simply collects his pay and goes home by himself on his motorcycle. The reason he does so is because he accidentally killed a man, while fighting a MMA match and his guilt has closed him off from everyone.
Alice Belaïdi co-stars as Kenza Alaoui, a police detective and captain in the Marseilles police force. She's investigating a mass murder at a warehouse, which she believes is connected to a drug gang known as the "Manchours." She has a personal connection and a personal vendetta against the Manchours, which might cloud her judgment and make her push the limits of what she should or should not be doing. She's very tough and can be very aggressive. She can be quick to lose her temper and whip out her baton to beat some drug dealers or thugs.
As a lot of martial arts films, it's about the police either being incompetent or corrupt in some way. Therefore, only this one martial artist can solve the case or save the day. Or, it's about a lone vigilante who is the only one who can go up against whatever organized crime gang is at hand. Sometimes, that vigilante can be a cop himself. It's funny because in the Netflix recommendations, the recent film Havoc (2025) was a title listed, which was directed by Gareth Evans, a guy known for his martial arts films, particularly The Raid: Redemption (2012), a film that featured well-trained martial artist, Iko Uwais. However, Havoc starred Tom Hardy who isn't a well-trained, martial artist. It also featured a lot of gun violence, which isn't the hallmark for MMA fighters who do better with hand-to-hand combat. Yet, Havoc did have almost wall-to-wall fight scenes.
There isn't wall-to-wall action here and one particular action scene sets up what could have been a bad-ass sequence for Ciryl Gane, but instead it just has him running, Tom Cruise-style through an apartment building only to disappoint from having him do any fight choreography in that scene. Gane really only has two action sequences. Technically, there are three fight scenes, but one is in the beginning simply to establish that he's a MMA fighter. The other two are the real action scenes, which also hold him up as almost on the level of super-heroes, but I felt like there should have been more. Clearly, this film isn't working on the same budget or craft, as comparable but better action flicks as Sam Hargrave's Extraction (2020) or Extraction II (2023).
Those Hargrave films are even more comparable because the plot of both Extraction and Extraction II involve the protagonist, played by Chris Hemsworth, having to find and rescue a child. Here, Gane's character of Bastien is also tasked with finding someone's child and protecting him or getting him back home safely. In Extraction II, Hemsworth's character also accidentally kills the father of the child he has to rescue, so this film shares the same plot as that 2023 film, but that Hargrave flick did a bit more to develop the relationship between Hemsworth's character and the child. There's some reckoning here between Bastien and the child named Léo, played by Maleaume Paquin, but it doesn't feel like enough. It does provide a moment for Gane to deliver a pretty well done monologue, talking about why Bastien and Léo have more in common than Léo thought, but again, it didn't ultimately feel like enough
Rated TV-MA.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 26 mins.
Available on Netflix.