District B13 - B-

In any French movie, so you can expect men to slap each other around a little, but in this cyber-European near-future action flick, people get knocked around pretty hard. District B13 is about two partners who infiltrate District B13, a walled off ghetto in Paris, to recover a stolen nuclear warhead. 2 cool things about this movie: 1. martial arts 2. The movie is crafted as an introduction to Parkour or street running, a frantic "sport" and recent internet craze that has men running all over an urban sprawl like a jungle gym. The two heroes (particularly Leito, played by David Belle) are responsible for the coolest scenes that involve frenetic escapes from the gun-wielding gangsters chasing them. This style of handling a sticky situation doesn't involve beating the crap out of every single challenger; the object is to escape. The heroes will throw a punch here or a kick there, just enough to get away. It's really fun to watch, and leaves you wanting to see more. However, the middle of the film drags into such boring pursuits as "plot" and "character development" which left me bored and wanting to see more reasons for David Belle to escape from somewhere. Cyril Rafaellie picks it up with a heart-pumping one man assault on a dirty casino in which he rolls through around 40 guys in a sweet beatdown scene.

The movie kind of went like this for me. Blah blah blah blah *french* talk talk talk WOAH COOL HE JUST SNAPPED THAT GUY'S NECK! blah blah talk talk...

The plot is really bad, but that's what you expect in a martial arts flick, right? Girls get kidnapped, egos get challenged, cars get blown up, heads get busted. The trick is to spend as little time as possible on the canned plot and two-dimensional themes and just focus on the cool stuff. B13 packs the action in, but there are a few dorky scenes that have the two partners philosophizing with each other about "values" and "morality": don't care! Just beat people down, that's all we want to see.