Career stuntmen David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli try to stretch their minimal acting chops in the disastrous District 13
Instead of trying to compete with the gritty realism portrayed in the Bourne movies, District 13: Ultimatum is the kind of movie in which the protagonists manage to run through endless hordes of bad guys and bring down evil conspirators without a single scratch. No, this is not a comedy, and yes, you come away with the impression that it was trying to take itself seriously.
To get a sense of the intention behind the film, just take a look at the two lead “actors” — Cyril Raffaelli and David Belle, both stuntmen in the industry. Besides a bunch of French films, Raffaelli has worked on the Transporter movies and The Incredible Hulk. Belle has a shorter resume but is well known for founding parkour.
Don’t know what parkour is? Just YouTube it, and you will find some very agile young men and women running and performing stunts through urban areas.
And that is exactly what you will get if you put the money down for this movie. Raffaelli and Belle run around a fictional parkour paradise amidst a completely asinine plot that takes way too many liberties for the sake of the stunts.
First example: Capt. Damien Tomaso (Raffaelli) needs to protect a Van Gogh painting worth 200 million euros during an extremely violent drug bust. So what does he do? He uses the painting to take out a bunch of baddies and then flings it across the room. Guess what? No scratch. Admittedly, some very cool stunts took place, but the end result is just too idiotic to accept.
Example two: Leito (Belle) gets himself thrown in jail to break Tomaso out. For some reason, none of the guards have guns, and they decide to fight the duo one at a time. The fighting is inventive at times, but the setup seems like it was written by a fifth grader … who is learning how to write … for the first time.
Of course, the plot is paper thin. The French Secret Service, known as DISS, kills a couple beat cops and drops them in the middle of Paris’ District 13, a walled-off sector controlled by five gang leaders. They video record a couple gangsters shooting up the car and release it to the press, causing rioting in Paris. This allows the leader of the DISS to convince the president to completely destroy District 13 in order to rebuild it all nice and pretty. Leito and Tomaso find another video showing what really happened. They now have to break into the president’s office to show him the video and stop the bombing run on District 13.
Where the Wild Things Are had a more convincing plot. Even P. D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother? was more emotionally affecting than this piece of junk.
Belle and Raffaelli should go back to stunt work for the rest of their Hollywood careers and never look back. The fact that this movie is a sequel is one of the most disheartening things to ever cross a critic’s mind. There should be some sort of punishment by law for subjecting a viewer to bottom of the barrel crap like this … a second time.
To expect anything more than a bunch of contrived stunts and fight scenes would be a mistake. Quite frankly, that is not enough to recommend this ridiculously poor excuse for entertainment.
Why pay the price of a movie ticket for something you can get on YouTube? There is nothing even remotely redeeming about this film.
diversions@umdbk.com
RATING: 0.5 stars out of 5