District B13 (2004)

(Originally released as Banlieue 13)

Starring: David Belle, Cyril Raffaelli, Tony D’Amario, Larbi Naceri, Dany Verissimo, François Chattot

First, The Lowdown: A cop and a street punk have to take back a nuclear bomb from a gangster.

Paris, France – 2010. To help contain the rampant crime in the city, the more dangerous districts have been walled off to keep the dangerous persons in. Now those neighborhoods are run entirely by the strongest gangs, and the poorer citizens are kept under their thumb. Leito makes an honest living by keeping his apartment block clean and safe from crime, by eliminating any drug dealers. After intercepting over 1 million Euros in heroin, Leito did not anticipate the intended recipient, Taha, to miss it so quickly. Taha sends a group of thugs to retrieve the stolen merchandise and bring back Leito alive, but unfortunately Leito had already disposed of the drugs (down the drain of his bathtub). The thugs’ attempt to capture him is equally unsuccessful as Leito is a master of the anti-gravity art of Parkour – making the man as easy to hold onto as a handful of Jell-O.

Taha is not terribly amused that Leito has given them the slip and has his men kidnap Leito’s sister, Lola. However, they did not anticipate on Leito following them to Taha’s base. Before Taha has the chance to have the message go out to Leito about his sister, he bursts through a window and takes Taha hostage. The brother and sister lead Taha to a police checkpoint, only to find out that the police are pulling out of their area and locking the door behind them. Leito implores to the police inspector in charge to arrest Taha for drug trafficking (after presenting a briefcase full of evidence), but after seeing that Taha’s thugs outnumber the cops, the inspector decides to arrest Leio instead! Taha takes Lola as compensation, and Leito goes to the hoosegow.

Six months later.

Capt. Damien Tomaso is an undercover cop with a well-deserved reputation for being the best. After seamlessly infiltrating and busting a crime boss’s underground casino, he is given a much more challenging assignment. An unmarked military vehicle was hijacked by Taha’s gang and taken to District B13. In the back is a “clean” neutron bomb, designed to wipe out the population, but leave the structures intact and disperse its radiation quickly. When Taha opens the crate for it, the bomb’s 24-hour failsafe went off. Now Damien has less than a day to find out where the bomb is and disarm it. His only guide to it, however is Leito.

It was only a matter of time before the filmmakers got hold of David Belle. I’m just thankful that it was Luc Besson (who brought us Leon and La Femme Nikita) instead of Michael Bay. For the uninitiated, Parkour is an eye-popping stunt-sport where it’s participants leap, flip, and climb over obstacles in such an efficient way, you’d think someone armed and dangerous was chasing them. The people who practice Parkour (or “traceurs") use physics that one only finds in video games and the occasional Shaw Brothers feature – only they aren’t doing it with wires. All one needs to do is look up “Parkour” on any video site and you’ll see what I mean (make sure you bring a pair of pants for when you shit yourself, though.)

So it was only natural that this physical feat was brought to the silver screen. Since the Wachowski Brothers brought about a martial arts renaissance not seen since Bruce Lee, it seemed that every Hollywood blockbuster had to cache in on the same success. (“It’s a good thing that supermodel knows kung-fu, otherwise she’d be screwed.” “Why don’t the nameless armed thugs shoot her, though? They got guns.” “Shut up, you’re breaking the movie.”) It’s refreshing to see stuntwork that doesn’t involve wirework normally found in a stage production of Peter Pan or look out of place on the characters using it (sorry, Shaquille O’Neal, but one Nintendo game does not a martial artist make.)

Unfortunately, the movie seems to be in too much of a hurry. After spending quite a bit of time introducing our characters in as action-packed a fashion as possible, suddenly everything stops so that we can finally figure out what our Maguffin is. The main dynamic of Leito and Damien seems to be to argue at length with each other and/or leave the other handcuffed to some random object. Plus, for a secondary character, we’re given a lot more background on Damien than Leito. Yeah, we realize that Leito’s a good guy (he hates drug dealers and looks after his sister, after all), but we don’t really know that Leito does. It’s a small point, but without it, Leito just comes off as the guy who can elude capture while looking slicker than a freshly shaved James Gandolfini on a Slip ‘n Slide coated with bearing grease.

Line of the Movie: “Take out your police manual and look up the page that says ‘up shit creek.’”

Four stars. Your shoelace is untied.