Richard Madden and Idris Elba make The Take an entertaining way to mark Bastille Day

The Take is a fine showcase for Idris Elba and Richard Madden, and an exciting adventure for film fans, as we’ll explore in the latest Deeper Cut.

For every blockbuster movie an actor does, there are two you don’t know—and that’s the case with The Take. Idris Elba and Richard Madden in an action movie is a heady combination that ought to be better appreciated.

When you put those three things together, it sounds like the next Hollywood blockbuster. But The Take—which is actually called Bastille Day, but was retitled in America—is one of the many films that largely disappeared into obscurity, thanks to a variety of factors, and it’s never gotten its due since its 2016 release.

In case you haven’t seen it (and you probably haven’t), a summary: a career thief named Michael Mason — played by Madden, now a Golden Globe winner and soon to be Emmy nominee for the Netflix series Bodyguard — gets framed for a terrorist attack. He teams up with rule-breaking CIA agent Sean Briar, who’s a quintessential Idris Elba character, to clear his name and stop the actual bad guys.

The good guy/not-quite-so-good guy buddy picture isn’t a new concept (see: Lethal Weapon, et al.), but writers Andrew Baldwin and James Watkins (the latter of whom also directed) keep it interesting with twists in the characters and not forcing too many twists in the plot.

And then there’s Madden and Elba, a pairing that’s so good you wonder why somebody hadn’t put them together sooner. They need to work together more often.

This column contains light spoilers for The Take.

The Take starts with an intriguing premise: Michael steals a woman’s bag, looking for something he can fence on the black market. He doesn’t realize the teddy bear inside is concealing explosives, and when he throws the bag away, it blows up in a Paris square—killing four people and making him public enemy number one.

The way Madden plays him keeps him from becoming a criminal stereotype. Just three years removed from portraying Robb Stark in Game of Thrones, Madden creates a character who’s more vulnerable than suave. He’s got the requisite amount of street smarts, but he’s not cocky or thinking he’s above the law. In fact, he collapses like a house of cards when Briar first interrogates him. And that makes him far more interesting.

Audiences see him take an emotional journey throughout the film, not just scared for himself but horrified by the violence left in his wake, whether it’s the bombing or the beating his friend takes from the corrupt cops who storm his apartment looking for Michael. He’s a character who genuinely grows up through the movie.

Idris Elba has the more stock character. Sean is the government operative who doesn’t play by the rules. When The Take introduces him, he’s getting in trouble for doing more than surveillance while part of a CIA surveillance unit. Of course, he’s right, because those type of characters always are.

But anyone who’s watched Elba over the last 20 years knows he has a particular knack for those roles. Whether it was Stringer Bell in The Wire or Vaughan Rice in Ultraviolet, he can bend rules and get away with it because he’s a force of nature. (Watkins and Baldwin even make fun of this in the script; when Briar asks why Michael ran from him, his response is, “You were coming after me. Have you seen yourself?”)

And there’s a third player, too: Charlotte Le Bon (The Walk) as Zoe Naville, who changed her mind about planting the bomb before Michael stole her bag. Zoe is freaked out about what’s happened and the knowledge that the conspirators now want to kill her as a loose end so she helps Briar and Michael — without devolving into a sudden love interest for the latter.

Each one of these characters has their own story, and because of that, The Take has the heart so many action movies lack. It’s not just shooting, punching and running; it’s two people who found themselves in over their heads in a terrorist plot, and are desperate to fix it. The audience wants Michael and Zoe to get through this okay, and knows that Briar is the only person who can make it happen.

The Take‘s other characters are pretty obvious—Briar’s skeptical, no-nonsense CIA colleagues, the corrupt French cop, the government official who seems like a good guy but turns in the third act to be revealed as the mastermind. But it doesn’t matter as much as it would in another film, because we’re invested in the heroes and want to follow them everywhere.

What helps is that the script doesn’t try to be anything more than a straightforward thriller, and it also provides certain quiet moments for Michael and Briar to genuinely interact as people. There’s a fun scene included in the trailer where Michael wants to know if he gets a gun, because it makes sense to want one when you’re being pursued by almost everybody, and Briar’s reaction is so spot on that words aren’t even necessary.

There are other moments, too, as The Take has them spend a fair portion of the film looking for Zoe, and the driving and sleuthing give them other opportunities to figure each other out. Michael pegs Briar as reckless and irresponsible; Briar recognizes the value of Michael’s skills and has him take the lead on approaching Zoe’s boyfriend. They don’t become instant buddies and they end up having actually interesting dialogues, avoiding Hollywood’s need for the pithy one-liner.

Idris Elba and Richard Madden are genuinely fun and fantastic together. Their individual talents make for a combination that works, and they have honest chemistry as a duo, rather than so many movies where actors are tossed together and viewers are expected to embrace them as a pair. They earn our appreciation, which in turn enables the movie to earn our attention and its payoff.

But as a co-production between three different countries, and being affected by not one but two real-life terrorist attacks, the stars never aligned for this film. It ended up floating under most people’s radar. Hopefully, with Madden’s success in Bodyguard and Elba now being a deservedly A-list star, more people will check it out.

The Take is a fun, charismatic adventure well worth taking.

The Take is now available on Blu-Ray, DVD and digitally on iTunes and Amazon Video. Find the latest Deeper Cut every Wednesday in the Entertainment category at FanSided.