My sister found out about the movie when watching a trailer on one of the TVs in Dick Smith. It looked cool and we came across the concept of parkour while watching Casino Royale (and were jaw-drop&stunned by it; well I was anyway). The type of "action" in District B-13 is pretty much 90% parkour and since the founder of parkour, David Belle, is in this movie, we were like, "Awesome, sweet as, let's watch it!"
The movie is set in 2010, in Paris where the most criminal and unruly parts of the city are walled off (literally walled off) from the rest of the city. David Belle's character, Leito, lives in district B-13, and he tries to thwart the bad guy (a sleazy thin bully called Taha) but ends up in prison for his efforts. Fast forward to six months later and a champion cop, Damien, has to get into B-13 to defuse a neutron bomb that Taha's goons stole from the French government. Leito is the only guy who knows his way around well enough, so Damien has to get Leito to team up with him and win over the bad guys.
Compared to the cinematic blockbusters we're so used to these days, I found District B-13 really refreshing at just over an hour. Being used to those aforementioned cinematic blockbusters, I also thought it was incredibly short. I was like, "Where's the action?" but there was action -- it just didn't take two-and-a-half hours to execute.
But the action was cool. It's very relaxed, even though it's an action movie. Well, I was relaxed anyway. The parkour scenes were awesome (there's one shot where Leito runs through the hallway and leaps up and literally slides through a narrow opening at the TOP of the door to get through it), and since the actor who plays Damien (Cyril Raffaelli; he did the stunt co-ordination on Transporter 2 amongst other things) is a stuntman and acrobat, the fight scenes are great and both Raffaelli and Belle have this fluidity to them that is really fascinating to watch.
Did I mention the movie's French? Well, I have now -- the dialogue is in French (mm French sexy language) which made it hard for me to follow sometimes because I strayed from the captions. They don't talk much while the parkour scenes are up, though, which is good, because who wants to read words when you can watch people dance-run on TV?
The soundtrack on this thing reminded me of how greatly I think of French hip-hop. Before I'd only been listening to MC Solaar (who is awesome), but the music that played while the end credits rolled was really good as well. The French language gives everything such a nice, smooth, feel...
Overall it was a nice 85 minutes on a Tuesday night. I'd give it 7.6/10, especially if you're interested in French movies and engaging action sequences. The plot isn't too bad either; I actually thought the plot was resolved far too quickly and I was caught a bit off-guard at how suddenly Leito pieced everything together to reveal at the end, but I like to go along for the ride and not think too much about things and if you don't do that then you'll be sweet as. After all, District B-13 isn't a "thinking" film. You want that, go watch a David Lynch flick.
The movie is set in 2010, in Paris where the most criminal and unruly parts of the city are walled off (literally walled off) from the rest of the city. David Belle's character, Leito, lives in district B-13, and he tries to thwart the bad guy (a sleazy thin bully called Taha) but ends up in prison for his efforts. Fast forward to six months later and a champion cop, Damien, has to get into B-13 to defuse a neutron bomb that Taha's goons stole from the French government. Leito is the only guy who knows his way around well enough, so Damien has to get Leito to team up with him and win over the bad guys.
Compared to the cinematic blockbusters we're so used to these days, I found District B-13 really refreshing at just over an hour. Being used to those aforementioned cinematic blockbusters, I also thought it was incredibly short. I was like, "Where's the action?" but there was action -- it just didn't take two-and-a-half hours to execute.
But the action was cool. It's very relaxed, even though it's an action movie. Well, I was relaxed anyway. The parkour scenes were awesome (there's one shot where Leito runs through the hallway and leaps up and literally slides through a narrow opening at the TOP of the door to get through it), and since the actor who plays Damien (Cyril Raffaelli; he did the stunt co-ordination on Transporter 2 amongst other things) is a stuntman and acrobat, the fight scenes are great and both Raffaelli and Belle have this fluidity to them that is really fascinating to watch.
Did I mention the movie's French? Well, I have now -- the dialogue is in French (mm French sexy language) which made it hard for me to follow sometimes because I strayed from the captions. They don't talk much while the parkour scenes are up, though, which is good, because who wants to read words when you can watch people dance-run on TV?
The soundtrack on this thing reminded me of how greatly I think of French hip-hop. Before I'd only been listening to MC Solaar (who is awesome), but the music that played while the end credits rolled was really good as well. The French language gives everything such a nice, smooth, feel...
Overall it was a nice 85 minutes on a Tuesday night. I'd give it 7.6/10, especially if you're interested in French movies and engaging action sequences. The plot isn't too bad either; I actually thought the plot was resolved far too quickly and I was caught a bit off-guard at how suddenly Leito pieced everything together to reveal at the end, but I like to go along for the ride and not think too much about things and if you don't do that then you'll be sweet as. After all, District B-13 isn't a "thinking" film. You want that, go watch a David Lynch flick.
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