The film is about the conflict of 2 police officers, Leo Vrinks (Daniel Auteuil) and Denis Klein (Gerard Depardieu), for career advancement. Both are entrenched with the desire to out-compete each other and thrive for good performance by arresting a wanted lethal gang. Their pursuance of their goal renders both committing sinful acts and becoming villains, which is eventually both career spoiling and live wrecking.

Director Olivier Marchal manipulates visual and sound motifs in a prophetic way to invoke the hypothesis forming mechanism of the audience by using discontinuous editing to pre-reveal 3 shots and a yelling vocal of Leo at the beginning sequence, without precipitating any further information on what the shots and vocal are about. Only until the middle of the film can the audience have a confirmed decipherment of what they are presented at the beginning when the same shots are shown again (in the same order as well). This device effectively adds strengths to the focus of the story.

Story progression is moderate and propelled by a mild degree of cross-editing among 2 main parallel plots, namely, Leo and Denis. The 2 main plots are further intermingled with a few subplots of the lethal gang and other villains in the later part of the film. Visually, Marchal adopts shoulder-level shooting (instead of the usual eye-level shooting) for nearly all shots of police figures and low angle shots of police buildings (in the establishment shots) to emphasize the dominance and powerfulness of the police (a very common film language). In terms of audio, to complement the atmospheric setting of the diegesis, non-diegetic piano music in a lonely and sober melody in low volume is played almost throughout the movie. The film has a longer plot time on Leo and it is compatible to the listing order of the cast in the film's posters that the name of Daniel Auteuil is shown before that of Gerard Depardieu. Auteuil stages very well.

While "Heat" (Dir: Michael Mann, 1995) delivers a portrayal on the extraordinary mutual appreciation/respect (which should not exist in normal circumstances) between a police officer (Al Pacino) and a gang leader (Robert De Niro), "36 QdO" levies its focus on the rivalry and then revenge (which is unusual) between 2 officers. In "36 QdO", the chasing of the gang is merely a medium over which the struggle between the 2 protagonists (actually villains) intensifies and itself is, unlike "Heat", not the subject of the story.

The film presents a clichˆm of the workplace ethics and is loaded with a theme on the issue of means (the way) and ends (result) in the pursuit of goals and personal integrity. It is a milieu of and endemic to the workplace as well as other social/personal settings. Distinguished from the US cops films featuring extended sequences of car-chasing and the formulaic rock/pop music, this French flick is a finely readable fresh product exhibiting certain degree of thematic depth while not lacking the common elements of the cop genre.