Zero: Jean Luc Herbulot’s ticking time-bomb thriller shows a lot of promise

Whatever turns your Crank: for the dwindling sect of worshippers at the Church of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who directed the 2006 Jason Statham vehicle, the recent emergence of Congolese action director Jean Luc Herbulot is a welcome development. Walking – or, more precisely, sprinting – along the tightrope separating adrenalised genre cinema from decadent excess, Herbulot fuses acceleration to attitude in exciting ways. His amped-up style, all restless handheld paranoia and swooping drone shots, doesn’t give you much time to think. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have anything on his mind.

Herbulot’s breakthrough, Saloum, a wild, supernaturally inflected tale of mercenaries waylaid in a Senegalese river delta, zoomed around the festival circuit in 2021. Like its predecessor, Zero plays with recognisable tropes; what it lacks in invention it makes up for in vigour. The basic set-up is an ear-piece thriller à la Netflix hit Carry-On (2024), with a pair of unlucky Americans instrumentalised by an unseen mastermind to run a set of dangerous errands across Dakar (rendered in splashy, comic-strip colours by cinematographer Gregory Turbellier). The two strangers – Hus Miller as ‘One’, Cam McHarg as ‘ Two’ – have to do exactly as they’re told, even when their instructions place them directly in harm’s way. If they don’t follow orders, the smooth operator at the other end of the line (a cipher voiced with menace by Willem Dafoe) will detonate the bombs strapped to their chests.

A little bit of Speed (1994), a little bit of Saw (2004), a lot of sweaty stunt performers; in a movie that wears its transnational aspirations proudly, Dafoe provides some brand-name gravitas. The actor signed on after seeing a rough cut: his performance was dubbed over Herbulot’s own temporary vocal take, and the character has a self-reflexive aspect – he’s a directorial substitute, stage-managing chaos at a bemused remove. Such abstractions are fun to fiddle with, but gradually, they give way to a more granular sort of allegory – one with anticolonial implications. The more Dafoe’s ad hoc operatives rile up local criminal and law enforcement with their antics, the closer they come to inciting literal revolution, which, as it turns out, is the point of the exercise. Zero is too weightless to be truly profound, but its depiction of an African country buckling under the combined weight of internal divisions and foreign intervention still resonates; Herbulot is one to watch as he keeps hurtling forward.

► Zero is in UK cinemas 25 July.