Review of Brick Mansions (2014) by Maineutral R — 19 Sep 2014

A straight-up, cliché-driven action film that can be entertaining at times, but mostly obnoxious. Brick Mansions is a remake of District B13 (which I have not seen, but I wish) adapted by Luc Besson, who often makes good AND bad action films. This film is also post-Paul Walker's death, meaning this could have acted as a great tribute to such beloved actor...but simply mentioning his participation in this film disgraces his well-known name.

The problem with Brick Mansions is the lack of plot. Let's just say I think the script was only 50 pages long, and the rest was covered with lousy and choppy action scenes to make it last an hour and a half. The movie is so busy in showing entertainment that it forgets to develop actual stories, and thus, the twists and change of sides are merely forced-up our asses. The dialogue has a lot of awful lines and even the countless action scenes are problematic. First of all, the editing and camerawork on them are atrocious. The camera moves too much and uses a lot of close-ups and quick cuts, and some of the cuts don't follow well the action. So, yeah, there's a lot of action scenes, but all of them filmed with the same problems, resulting in not being as much fun as it should. Overall, the movie has little to nothing to offer, that without saying that the movie follows pretty much every action cliché in the worst way possible.

Brick Mansions is just an average and forgettable action movie, but definitely is not awful. It still entertained me, but I expected to have fun, which is not the same. It's not one of the worst of this year, but surely is one of the most forgettable.