District 13: Ultimatum

Luc Besson continues to be behind some of the most action packed genre flicks around, here in the role as screenwriter and producer on District 13: Ultimatum. The film is the sequel to just regular District 13 (from 2004), or Banlieue 13 or even District B13. Of course after District 9, a wholly unrelated title yet no doubt confusing to the layman, don’t even begin to go there.
D13 uses the stunt stylings known as parkour, a kind of power combo or martial arts and gymnastics, and D13: Ultimatum has the distinction of featuring one of the main practioners of the movement David Belle in the lead.
Banlieue 13 was a heavy influence on the opening sequence of the reboot of James Bond in Casino Royale (2006), although Banlieue 13 had a much smaller art house release. D13 was the story of castes of downcast society enclosed within cement walls to prevent their decay seeping out to the more refined areas of Paris. D13: Ultimatum continues this train of though.
Parallel stories follow rebel Leito (Belle) making an alliance with one of the factions cordoned off in D13, while supercop Capt. Tomaso (Cyril Raffaelli) takes down an entire gangster’s empire in a worthy sequence that composes most of the first two reels. Events conspire against Tomaso when he’s set up on a phony heroin bust and he contacts his uneasy ally Leito to bust him out of the joint. The conspiracy goes all the way up to the President (of France natch) while narrative twists revolve around taking out D13 with strategic bombs. The President must order the strikes and one of his main advisors hopes to gain contracts involved in the rebuilding of the decimated area.
Okay enough plot, but what about the action? After all the attraction of this particular kind of running and jumping plus the leap through the transom from the first movie holds a high bar. It’s a barrier D13: U makes its own as Belle does a leap and gravity defying upwards spin out his balcony window and Raffaelli dives from mid-air through the narrow window of an economy sized automobile.
Maybe the action choreography is as good as it gets. Certainly the fact the main actors are doing their own stunts adds to the realism. And the look and feel exceeds similar genre movies. But the main thing that makes District 13: Ultimatum fun to watch despite editing that suggests some wires may’ve been used in the stunts is the clockwork mechanism of its movement. When the first D13 came out it was set in the then far out year 2010, and likewise the sequel posits itself a few years after that. The setting isn’t so much science fiction as metropolitan dystopia.