Philippe Noiret is the perfect choice for the part of the laid back cop who is so corrupt that he scarcely notices how corrupt he has become (casually receiving back-handers and letting suspected criminals off the hook almost as if he was morally obliged to).  It is the kind of role which Noiret plays best and in which, sadly, the actor has become irreversibly typecast.  Alongside this master of black comedy, Thierry Lhermitte appears rather bland, although he works rather well as the unlikeable stooge to Noiret’s amiable “ripou” (which is French back-slang for “rotten one”).

What makes this a particularly entertaining film is the way in which it satirises not just the French police system (which everyone knows was rife with corruption at the time) but also the French crime-thriller genre. The icon of the policier genre in the early to mid 1980s was Jean-Paul Belmondo, who invariably ended up playing a police inspector who used unorthodox (sometimes criminal) methods to achieve results.  Les Ripoux goes one step further and makes the police into loveable villains who behave in the same complacent way as Belmondo (with Lhermitte even wearing an exact copy of Belmondo’s outfit from Le Marginal of 1983).

Even to those who are not familiar with the genre, there is a great deal to like in this film.  In additional to the conventional thriller ending (which naturally involves a high-speed car chase and shoot out in the neon-lit streets of Paris), the comedy is well constructed – and very tongue in cheek – managing to avoid the cheap farce of some of Zidi’s lesser films.