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Free-running thriller
District 13
Directed by Pierre Morel
Certificate 18
IT is just surprising that it has taken so long for the craze of free running to hit the big screen – after all, the acrobatic French sport which tests muscle-bound daredevils is great to watch.
In District 13, Luc Beeson uses it to great effect, enlisting the help of two of the sports biggest stars: Cyril Raffaelli and David Belle.
The pair have charisma and their stunts are reminiscent of early Jackie Chan films such as Police Story.
This is fortunate, because the film has little else. It is simplistic in the extreme: a bomb primed to explode, a girl to rescue from the evil clutches of gangsters, and two chums out to save the day.
And while it lacks the guile of such movies as Leon, Besson is far too accomplished to make a schlock thriller – and drawing on the craze for free running gives it an added wow dimension.
Set in the suburbs of Paris that some may find uncomfortably like the hazy summer days of the here and now, with social cohesion the last thing on people’s minds as crime rockets and riots tear apart communities, District 13 paints an uncomfortable picture of disintegrating cities in the near future.
It is a walled off area, much like 2000AD’s Mega City One, run by a drug mogul Taha (Bibi Naceri) and his evil cartoonish cohorts.
But streetwise hero Leito (Belle) doesn’t want Taha to have it his own way – and sets about harassing the drug dealers and destroying their stashes.
But when Leito’s sister Lola (Dany Verissimo) is kidnapped in revenge for his vigilante work, the heat is on. Throw in a nuclear bomb that Taha has managed to get hold of, a resourceful cop Damien (Raffaelli) who asks Leito to lend a hand recovering it, and you can see instantly where this is going.
But although Besson pinches from the Hong Kong genre, uses plot lines that resemble Judge Dredd and an atmosphere borrowing from Escape From New York, Besson is having too much fun with outrageous costumes, grim cityscapes, souped up cars and implausibly acrobatic heroes to care – and with some brilliantly choreographed scenes showing the pair dancing across rooftops, the demographic this is aimed at – teenage boys – will not care. |
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