For a movie that’s mainly about algorithms and the havoc they wreak on society, the French dystopian thriller Dog 51 (Chien 51) doesn’t appear conscious of the fact that it was made by an algorithm as well. Or at least that’s what it seems like.

Directed by Cédric Jimenez, whose heavy-handed, adrenaline-charged films (The Connection, The Stronghold) have always felt rather formulaic, this tale of two crimefighting lovebirds hunting down a killer in near-future Paris will give most viewers a major sense of déjà vu — which, if you don’t speak French, means “already seen.”

Or maybe you haven’t already seen Children of Men, or Minority Report, or Blade Runner — all movies that Jimenez and co-writer Olivier Demangel seem to have plugged into whatever algorithm they used to generate their screenplay, which was adapted from the novel by Laurent Gaudé (who perhaps plugged Phillip K. Dick into his own writing algorithm).

If you don’t know those other films, you may be surprised by much of what happens in Dog 51. Everyone else will only roll their eyes at its overfamiliarity, whether aesthetic, thematic or dramatic, in a movie that hits one obvious note after another. They may also have figured out the plot’s big mystery a long time before the protagonists wind up doing it themselves.  

Fast, occasionally fun and furiously derivative, Jimenez’s film raises a few more questions, such as: Why do stars Gilles Lellouche and Adèle Exarchopoulos, who play a pair of law enforcers named Zem and Salia, both have haircuts from the 1990s — the former sporting an early Eminem look with bleached white hair, the latter a bob resembling Uma Thurman’s in Pulp Fiction?

Also, why is arthouse pretty boy Louis Garrel, who portrays the leader of a resistance group known as Breakwalls (That’s seriously their name. As in: “Hey, stop breakin’ my walls!”), somehow styled to look like Brandon Lee in The Crow, dressed in an overcoat with his long black curls glistening in the rain?

The story is set in what’s supposed to be an Orwellian Paris decades in the future — the city is divided into class-based zones protected by military checkpoints; an AI called ALMA reconstitutes crime scenes and tracks down perpetrators — and yet Dog 51 seems stuck in the 1980s, 90s or early aughts, when all the films it keeps copying from were made.

The nostalgia reaches its crescendo in one of the only real standout moments: Seemingly out of nowhere, and just after Zem and Salia have interrogated a prostitute about her boyfriend’s sordid murder, the cops head to a futuristic karaoke bar and belt out 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up” in their heavy French accents. It’s a supremely silly scene but at least it’s trying something different.

It’s also the type of offbeat sequence you can encounter in Luc Besson’s sci-fi flicks The Fifth Element and Valerian, making Dog 51 one of the rare cases where a little more Besson might have done some good. But Jimenez’s movies tend to be overtly self-serious — and some would argue, borderline fascistic — leaving little room for humor. To his credit, the director does get in a few good jokes with Lellouche’s washed-up cop character, who drags himself to work in the morning looking like the algorithm forgot to put his face on properly.

Jimenez also makes the most out of what must have been a healthy budget (financed by both Canal+ and Netflix), shooting in key Paris locations that the VFX team decks out with Blade Runner-style apartment towers and neon signage. One stunt sequence has Zem hopping into the Seine for an underwater swim — apparently this will still be possible in the near-future, which is pretty good news — and infiltrating the city’s elitist Zone 1, a walled-off enclave that looks a lot like Paris’ hoity-toity 1^st arrondissement.

In other words, much of what we see in Dog 51 is meant to reflect our current epoch, whether it’s the widening class divide, the militarization of our police forces or the ubiquity of algorithms in every aspect of our lives, from shopping to sex to crime solving. And in case you didn’t get all that, there’s plenty of expository dialogue in each scene to explain everything.

The film’s take on what awaits Parisians in the years to come is a dark one indeed. And yet amid all the gloom and doom, Lellouche and Exarchopoulos manage to showcase some frisky on-screen chemistry, their characters taking several digs at each other as they ride around town searching for the culprit.

Compared to Romain Duris, who plays the French interior minister with what can only be described as resting bitch face, and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, who’s supposed to be some kind of altruistic doctor, at least the two leads don’t take themselves so seriously. But then things suddenly get very serious when Zem and Salia wind up falling in love, leading to a tragic denouement at the hands of ALMA, followed by an obvious music cue that must have cost a fortune.

By that point, we’re supposed to feel something for the two tortured cops — or at least that’s what all the close-ups, including a late one of Exarchopoulos’ backside, keep telling us. It seems like the algorithm took care of everything in Dog 51, except making us care.