Friday, 6 July 2012

DVD review: District 13 Ultimatum


The mad French parkour masters are back!
Strangely in the five years following 2004 District 13 nobody followed his lead and so to get another dose of parkour acrobatic we had to wait for the sequel.
The answer to the obvious question “Does it live up to the first movie legacy?” sadly is a resounding no. It’s not a bad effort but it was misconceived from the beginning.
The plot is stupid but this is not the real problem, we don’t expect the plot for a parkour movie to be any intelligent. The real problem is that the plot is not really very fun, it’s like a strange mutant version of “The warriors” were the various gangs, all good guys, are presented as real bad asses but somehow they never do a lot. An inordinate amount of time is spent on the French president, played by a serious French actor, Philippe Torreton, who, according to the extras, always wanted to be in an action movie, just to drag it down with inane gravitas I would like to add.
The two heroes from the first one, Cyril Raffaelli and parkour god David Belle, are back. They choreographed personally the stunts and all the action scenes bringing in their usual level of cheerful insanity but it just doesn’t manage to get to the next level. The inane plot robs it of every sense of urgency and an extremely clean cinematography made every action feel very detached.
It’s still a good action movie, with incredible stunts that are way above most of the CGI and cable enhanced stuff that Hollywood feed us every day, but it clearly fails prey to the sequel law of diminishing returns.

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