Julien Royal’s All-Time High opens on Youssef (Nassim Lyes) in the middle of a bad run. The black-market trade in designer handbags has dried up, so he sits down at an underground poker table run by a pair of brothers, hands over a supposedly authentic Rolex as collateral, and keeps losing. A fight breaks out. Youssef, who has looked like a man whose only weapon is his mouth, turns out to be able to handle himself, and he bolts before the injuries get serious. As Cinema Express tells it, this is also where he meets a boisterous woman who spends the evening mocking his play, and who has swindled the den’s owners herself. It is a brisk, funny way to start, and it sets the rules: everyone here is working an angle, and nobody trusts a handshake.

The premise is simple. A con artist short of cash and a woman sitting on a crypto fortune hit it off, and from then on the film plays with the idea that she may be his perfect target while he may be hers. Cinema Express calls the setup clichéd and says the film makes it fairly engaging anyway. I agree with both halves of that sentence. Nothing in the outline is new, and the film seems to know it, because it puts its energy into tone instead. Ready Steady Cut counts action, comedy, romance and drama in the mix, and watching it feels like four films taking turns at the wheel.

The romance is the part that works. Lyes and Zoé Marchal, who plays Stéphanie, are an unlikely pair, and the film leans on that. Cinema Express singles out the chemistry between them as the thing that holds the interest, and the best illustration is a supermarket scene. Stéphanie rattles off what she will be worth once the crypto is sold, then makes a fuss at the checkout because she cannot pay for her groceries, and Youssef ends up covering most of the bill. The man who thinks he is fleecing a rich woman is paying for her shopping. You cannot tell who is falling for whom, or whether the tenderness is one more performance, and that uncertainty drives the film. It builds more tension than any of the chases.

Lyes plays a man with several names. He is Youssef to the audience and Thiago in his girlfriend’s world, and Ready Steady Cut notes that the little scams he runs to keep up appearances for her start to unravel, his mask hitting the floor with a thud. The same review calls him cheesy but not charming, which sounds like a complaint and is in fact a compliment: the character is a salesman whose polish never quite takes, and Lyes plays that with ease. Ready Steady Cut praises his delivery in the scene where he comes clean to his girlfriend about who he is and what he looks like. That is the wig scene, and it is where the disguise stops being a gag and the man underneath finally shows. Cinema Express is less generous. His comic timing is great every now and then, it says, but the writing does not keep up with him. That is fair. There are stretches where he is clearly ahead of the lines he has been handed.

Marchal has the harder job. Ready Steady Cut describes her Stéphanie as neurotic, cool on the surface and insecure underneath, and she holds that contradiction without tipping into either side. She is loud and sure of herself in one scene and brittle in the next. Cinema Express reports her flaunting a fortune in one breath and throwing a tantrum over groceries in the next, and she makes the two sit together as one woman rather than two jokes. She never plays Stéphanie as a mark, and that matters, because it keeps the con from running in one direction only.

The comedy is another matter. The film is built on slapstick and screwball: Ready Steady Cut mentions plenty of yelling, physical movement and over-the-top situations, with characters at their craziest just when they are trying hardest to make sense. When this lands, it is lively. But Cinema Express says the humour tries hard throughout and mostly ends up unnecessarily crass, and I cannot argue with that. Jokes that rely on volume wear out within minutes. The ones that rely on embarrassment, a man caught in the wrong costume at the wrong table, are the ones worth keeping.

In one respect the film does better than a typical comedy of this size. Cinema Express points to Youssef’s need to belong in the big leagues, shown at the home of his wealthy girlfriend, where her father and brother ridicule his flashy, overcompensating manner. It is a small, cruel scene about class, and it explains the lying better than any speech could. The money matters less to Youssef than the rooms it opens, and those are exactly the rooms where he is laughed at.

The weak spot is the plot. Ready Steady Cut admits to wondering where the story was going and what the point of the film was, and says that with two compulsive liars at the centre it is hard to tell what anyone intends, to the point of pausing to make a brew. Cinema Express reaches a similar place from another direction and blames the writing for failing to keep pace with its lead. That is the structural risk of this kind of film. When both leads lie in every scene, the audience has no fixed point to measure a reversal against, and the surprises stop feeling like surprises. Ready Steady Cut still credits the script for keeping us busy working the characters out and for never letting the pace drop. The film moves; it just does not always tell you where it is going.

The fight scenes deserve a separate word. Ready Steady Cut describes them as decent, well-choreographed and quite violent, not what the reviewer expected, and says they added a serious action element that pushed the narrative along. I would put it a little differently. They are a good surprise, and the poker-den brawl shows that Youssef’s mouth is far from his only resource, but they also make the tone harder to settle. A film that wants us to laugh at a man’s bad wig does not always sit comfortably next to a beating.

The supporting cast is large and busy. Adrien Essamir plays Papillon, Yousef Ramal is Parpaing, Yovel Lewkowski plays Yaël, Yassine Stein is Zak and Eric Cullet is Camion. The nicknames alone sketch the underworld Royal is drawing, a crowd of small-time operators who go by their handles. Hakim Jemili, Ciryl Gane and Adèle Exarchopoulos all appear as themselves, which adds a wink of celebrity to the proceedings.

One technical note, again from Ready Steady Cut. The reviewer, watching in a language other than the original, praises the voice-over actors, saying the quality had seriously improved and the comedy came across strongly. Dubbing is usually where a comedy loses its timing, so that is no small thing for a film that runs on rhythm.

The ending is intense but heartfelt, according to Ready Steady Cut, and it closes the loop: the player does get played, in a way you would not expect. I will leave the details alone. After so many scenes of bluffing, it is a relief that the film finally commits to something, and the heartfelt note lands better than the earlier crassness would suggest.

All-Time High is uneven, and it enjoys itself anyway. It has a likeable central pairing, a few good set pieces and a class joke that lands harder than the film seems to realise. It also has coarse humour, a story that loses its way, and a tonal mix that sometimes works against it. Watch it for Lyes and Marchal and the supermarket checkout; forget the rest quickly.