Review of District 13: Ultimatum (2009) by Jonny C — 01 Oct 2009

Inferior sequel that finds our heroes filling the power vacuum in B13 by uniting the Disney-ethnic gangs therein against their common enemy - old, white bureaucrats. This time the baddies are working for Harriburton (sic), and the buddy duo seem to perform as little parkour as possible in the struggle against them.

Raffaelli has a transvestite infiltration set piece early on, followed by an antiquities fight that is vastly inferior to what the Lau brothers were doing decades before. In general, the parkour looks great for the one or two chase sequences in this - but that's it. No opponents of equivalent martial ability are met with, and the anonymous armed and armored soldiers are dispatched with boring, bloodless ease.

Elodie Yung is the only female in the unlikely ethnic collective taking on the man, but she's compensated for this indignity with the largest collection of facial tattoos and a feature fight. It's decent but brief, and followed by more gratuitous slap-ups of white authority figures by our heroically representative team of Asian/Black/Muslim/Neo-Nazis.

I did not expect much from this, but it disappoints in the departments that the first film delivered on. At the same time, it is inadvertently hilarious in depicting ethnic identity. Which might have been fun, if the proceedings had not seemed so self-consciously hip and artificially rebellious.