The year is 2013 and crime in one Parisian suburb (District 13) has grown so out of control that the cops have sealed off the area with a fortified wall, leaving the druggies, rapists and murderers to fend for themselves.
Master of this lawless district is gun toting crime boss Taha (Naceri), who spends his days shooting inept underlings, boffing whores, and snorting buckets of cocaine.
So when Taha gets his hands on a nuclear bomb and threatens to wipe out the nation’s capital in 24 hours, the French government are understandably a bit nervous.
But, for some unknown reason, rather than calling in truck loads of heavily armed soldiers, the powers that be tell high kicking super cop Damien (Raffaelli) to recover the bomb, with only a reformed criminal (Belle), who used to live in the district, as backup.
They say:
Total Film: “The action sequences making you gasp, shame that most of them appear early on and the film struggles to scale such heights again. It could have been this year's Ong-Bak. It's not.”
Empire: “You could generate the script with a computer programme, but the thumpery has an effective, hand made feel.”
BBC: “With a sub A-Team plot and acting that makes the Teletubbies look like a Chekhov play, District 13 survives solely on its supersized diet of incredible action and pounding beats.”
We say:
Combine the premise of “Escape From New York” with the high kicking humour of “The Transporter” (also from Besson) and you get this brilliantly bonkers action extravaganza from first time director Pierre Morel.
Using stuntmen adept in the French extreme sport of “parkour” (in which participants leap off buildings, hurdle cars, and generally defy the laws of gravity) instead of accomplished actors in the lead roles, Morel injects the action sequences with breathtaking authenticity - a feeling compounded by his use of a high speed camera that recorded 150 frames per second (as opposed to the usual 24) rather than the standard CGI tomfoolery.
Admittedly, the plot is fairly loopy and amounts to no more than a string of chase/ fight sequences pasted together with the occasional bit of intentionally crazy plot exposition.
However, it all flies by, accompanied by a testosterone fuelled soundtrack and some decent jokes (Taha refuses to let one applicant into his criminal gang because he isn’t a university graduate), and even manages to make some prescient observations about the Paris riots, which occurred a year after “District 13” was filmed.
CAST
Cyril Raffaelli, David Belle, Tony D'Amario, Bibi Naceri, Dany Verissimo,
François Chattot, Nicolas Woirion, Patrick Olivier
DIRECTOR
Pierre Morel
TIME
85 mins
POSTED...
Fri 7 Jul 2006 at 3:36pm
