The week’s most exciting piece of trash is Pierre Morel’s District B13, which begins with an awesome credit sequence that syncs the crunching beats of a techno song with slick and stretchy snapshots of a ghetto walled off from the rest of Paris. Some might call this a spectacle of empty MTV flash, but there’s real excitement to the way image and sound flow here.
The film’s structure is that of a video game littered with mini-bosses and capped with an explosive, albeit moral, finale: Leito (David Belle), an ex-thug from District 13, spoils a drug lord’s stash of H; on the outside, Damien (Cyril Raffaelli), an undercover cop, apprehends a mob lord in miraculous fashion; and, together, the men orchestrate the retrieval of Leito’s sister (a strong creature who, at one point, shoves her panties into the mouth of the thug who grabbed her in the ass) and a “clean bomb” that appears to have its nuclear eye pointed at Paris.
Morel’s images stimulate the senses like a drug, their virtuosity justified by the equally pulse-raising ecstasy of Belle and Raffaelli’s fight-the-power bodymoving (recently appropriated by Madonna). The film doesn’t compare favorably with two other pop touchstones: Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run and the Chemical Brother’s La Haine-inspired “Galvanize” clip. In the former, Franka Potente’s sprinting is roused by love, and in the latter, the young crumpers who bust into a predominantly white club are motivated to action by a feeling of social exclusion.
B13’s lead characters aren’t as deeply moved as those postmodern resistance fighters but their allegiance has a political edge, as does the image-sound synergy of the film, encompassing a feeling of boiling social tension. Throughout, it’s as if Leito and Damien are attempting to refurbish the veracity of the French motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” in the same way that Morel and co-screenwriter LUc Besson try to restore the integrity of the action film.
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