District B13

In 1985, Warner Brothers came up with the bone-headed idea to make Gymkata, a movie in which gymnast Kurt Thomas combined his gymnastics with martial arts so that he could pommel horse kick his way through an international fighting tournament in the insular nation of Parmistan (the perfect site for a Star Wars anti-missile system). The lesson was that's it's not a good idea to base a movie around a fighting style, especially if that style is as absurd as the screenplay. That said, District B13 -- while largely an excuse to display the physical discipline parkour -- may just be the most entertaining movie I've seen this year. This is largely because the screenplay keeps it simple and the parkour action is more likely to inspire awe than guffaw.

Parkour is a discipline in which a person adapts his movements to each object in his path so that he can move through his environment as quickly as possible, whether by sliding through the narrowest of spaces or bounding off the walls. Parkour was originated by David Belle, who stars as Leito, one of the residents of District B13, an impoverished and ultraviolent ghetto that has been walled-off and banished by the French government (in 2010). The movie opens with Leito pissing off the Tony Montana-esque Taha (co-writer Bibi Naceri), leading to a parkour-fueled chase in which Leito evades Taha's goons in an escape sequence that's like The French Connection, but without the cars.

Taha then takes Leito's spunky sis Lola hostage and Leito's attempts to bring Taha to justice lead to his own imprisonment by the craven government. After fast forwarding 6 months, the film introduces Captain Damien Tomaso (Cyril Raffaelli) as he obliterates a casino full of heavies in a scene reminiscent of Kill Bill's "House of Blue Leaves" sequence, minus the wire work. When a top-secret "clean bomb" missile finds its way behind B13 walls, the government calls upon Tomaso to recover the missile with Leito as his underworld guide.

This movie definitely has the earmarks of a Luc Besson production (he also co-wrote the script), but it plays more like a cross between John Carpenter's Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China, right down to the pounding techno score by Da. Octopuss. And if you want a refuge from CGI saturation and minced action scenes, stuntman/actors Belle and Raffaelli are the real deal, pinballing off walls and performing jaw-dropping moves in director Pierre Morel's unbroken shots.

Conversely, if you want a perfectly credible plot or character development, look elsewhere as District B13 flies by in a breakneck 85 minutes, leaving little room for memorable characters (save Taha's main henchman, K2, a seeming cinematic cousin to Joaquin Phoenix's TNT character in U-Turn).

The film is presented in crisp, 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby Digital 5.1. Special features include some pointless outtakes, a mindblowing extended version of the casino showdown, and an excellent 54-minute making-of featurette that comprehensively covers all aspects of the movie, including its paper thin layer of social commentary. -- Colin Miller