A sequel to one of the better action movies of the last decade, this one comes with a generic-sounding subtitle, but shows that the ever-fecund mind of its screenwriter/producer Luc Besson ( La Femme Nikita, The Transporter) is still fertile. (Besson also has a hand in the simultaneously opening From Paris with Love.) Certainly District B13, set in a near-future Paris where the city’s most crime-ridden section had been walled off from the rest of town, would be better known were it not in French. The simple-but-serviceable plot provided a sturdy framework for original action sequences involving David Belle, inventor of a discipline called parkour. Parkour involves efficiently adapting one’s movements to the surrounding objects, which in practice means a lot of running and jumping.
There is unfortunately less parkour than in the original. Belle’s character, a kind of thug-turned-hero, plays second fiddle to the cop character played by Cyril Raffaelli in both films. Hand-to-hand combat and martial arts are the specialties of Raffaeli, who often works as a stuntman or stunt coordinator. In an over-the-top but highly entertaining early sequence that turns out to have nothing to do with the rest of the plot, he infiltrates a corrupt club, uses a disguise to lure the bad guys one by one, and uses an original Van Gogh painting as a weapon/shield while keeping it from getting scratched. Again, circumstances require that the cop and the ex-thug team up to save District 13, this time from outright demolition. The district is portrayed as a multicultural jungle so lawless that even the cops fear to tread there, yet in the end cynicism yields to the French values of liberté, egalité, fraternité.
IMDB link
viewed 1/28/10 at Ritz 5 (PFS screening) and reviewed 1/29/10
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