Review of District B13 (2004) by Halfwelshman — 12 Jan 2012

Luc Besson has written a quite staggering quantity of high-octane action movies in recent years. Though he now rarely gets behind the camera himself, he's clearly not out of ideas by any means - in Hollywood, he's scribed all three Transporter films, Taken and From Paris with Love and have all been released in the last decade.

Back home in France he's got another franchise on the go - District 13 (a sequel was released three years later). So it's not quite as slick or full of ideas as Besson's own directorial efforts, it's still immense fun.

Martial artist Cyril Raffaelli and parkour founder David Belle play a crusading cop and a slum resident wronged by a powerful drug lord respectively, and their incredible physicality is exploited to the max in a series of eye-popping, gravity-defying, wirework-free action set pieces.

The scenes that really stand out are the film's opening, where Leito (Belle) flees from some thugs across Parisian rooftops, and demonstrates the most creative way of getting down a stairwell ever committed to film, and also the scene where Tomasco (Raffaelli) single-handedly dispatches wave after wave of armed henchmen in a drug den.

These are the kinds of scenes action movies are made for. They are truly outstanding. The scenes in between the action are a little under-whelming, and though Raffaelli and Belle are decent actors as well as stuntmen, they have very little to work with considering the emotionally empty script.

The themes that the film addresses are also directly borrowed from Besson's previous French dystopian thriller Nikita - this isn't an outright complaint, it still makes for an entertaining enough back-story to the film, but it's a little less hard-hitting the second time round.

District 13's jaw-dropping choreography and stuntwork make it a cut-above most action movie fare, and it's a heart-pumping thrill-ride throughout, but a hollow core and Besson's recycled ideas hold it back from being anything more.