When a heavily-armed Marseille anti-gang squad led by Richard Vronski escorts gang patriarch Paul Maranzano between prisons, he asks to visit his wife in the hospital, who has terminal cancer.

One night, he gets drunk and drives away with a female officer, who is the new Police Chief, Leonetti's daughter, only to get shot at by gang members (he does not see their identity).

Fearing that Will will lose his job and go to jail for drunk driving, Captain Richard Vronski volunteers to take the blood test in his place.

To get out of the mess he finds himself in, Vronski strikes a deal with the Bastianis in which he and his unit’s men agree to shoot their rival, Nadal and his associates.

Leonetti, the police chief, who had been blackmailed by the Bastianis and whose incriminating dossier is handed over to Vronski as part of the deal, then closes the case, blaming the Nadal gang for the Marseille creek shootout.

At the end it is revealed that the killings were ordered by the head of Narcotics Bureau’s Special Ops chief, presumably to avenge the inadvertent death of their undercover agent by the anti-gang unit during the creek ambush.

[2] Elisabeth Vincentelli of The New York Times acknowledges that "Marchal’s movie [is] radical in its nihilism", as it depicts a "bleak vision" of "corruption [as] pervasive" and inescapable.

[4] While he praised the lighting on this "[i]nstant cop thriller", he lost patience with its "cast of relentless scowlers, ever-shifting loyalties, lack of any real characters and general cynicism for the state of the human soul".

[4] Reviewer Roger Moore calls it "[c]onvoluted, bloody and downbeat" and says that the film has "so many characters, intrigues and competing agendas" that it is "hard to follow".