Braquo, season two, DVD review It's baffling how little attention Braquo, the gritty good-cop, bad-cop Parisian thriller, has been given since its inception in 2009. Series one was an adrenaline-fuelled tour de force chucking a team of four main characters into rule-breaking scrapes, ambiguous moral dilemmas, torture, and finally, jail (Caplan), humiliating demotion (Walter and Roxane) and unemployment (Théo is out of the police force and snorting his body weight in cocaine). As soon as series two kicks off it's clear they won't be in the doldrums for long, as Caplan persuades the gang to get back together and clear their names through a job for high office that will see them infiltrate a dangerous organisation in return for their freedom. It's an exciting plot, watching Caplan unravel and struggle with a group of Angola mercenaries whose raison d'etre is not quite as it seems. The series soon descends into wonderful, bombastic farce. At one point I think I counted around twelve bad guys and at times it was very difficult to keep up. The octane is so high that it combusts occasionally but, still, it retained my attention. One villain in particular becomes quite absurd in his actions, with scenes of sexual violence that veer on the gratuitous. But Braquo's saving grace is the strength of its characters and a mostly flawless script (in this series written by Abdel Raouf Dafri, who co-wrote Mesrine). Sure, the trigger-happy Lemoine could exist in the pages of an Asterix comic along with the schlocky gangster grande dame, but generally, they have enough depth to make you love, or hate them. Also, it's refreshing to watch a show in which a lot of the enemies are women. There's a frisson of novelty and unpredictability that's interesting to watch - and, in the main, the female characters avoid the one-dimensional treatment that still exists in so many shows. At times I giggled and felt exasperated by the sheer ridiculousness of it all, but mostly it was spellbinding and I'll look forward to series three, after a quite nail-biting and shocking cliff-hanger.