District B13: Elegant Brutality, French Style

District B13 is a far, far better movie than it has any right to be. An ingenious mash-up of Escape from New York and psycho-stunt martial arts pictures like Ong-Bak, it has all the chic-yet-bone-crunching action you expected from The Transporter, and all the genuine, street-savvy, hip-hop attitude The Fast and the Furious promised but failed to deliver. It’s the first Luc Besson produced film that actually feels like Luc Besson—raging, self-confident, gleefully violent, and distinctly French.

The obvious reason to go see this movie is that it contains some of the most superhuman stunts and action sequences you’re likely to see this year. What’s great about this stuff is that it’s not CGI-enabled wire-fu, it’ flesh and blood performers doing death-defying impossible trick after death-defying impossible trick. Like last year’s mesmerizing Ong-Bak, it’s at least as much stunt show as movie; also like that film, it never feels too carefully staged. No matter how tightly choreographed the action scenes, they retain their fluidity and spontaneity; each is a gritty, improvised street dance that’s part acrobatics and part bar brawl. Rarely does an action film deliver such elegant, energized brutality.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the movie, though, is its political subtext. This is a movie in which a goodhearted street hood and an undercover cop team up to diffuse a nuclear bomb held by a drug lord in a walled-off Paris ghetto. In a simpler film, the good and bad would break down along traditional lines: cops good, drug lord bad, well-meaning street thugs also good. But in this movie, the drug lord is a symptom of government callousness.

Of course, this being a French film, we’re not to understand that government is the enemy because it’s bad, inefficient, incompetent, or power-hungry—no, the government is the enemy because it’s too concerned about economic costs and, as a result, not doing enough. The take-home lesson is that anybody who talks about the economic costs of government providing for its citizens is cruel and uncaring; it’s the government’s responsibility to take care of its people, economic realities be damned. When the drug lord demands the French government pay him 20 million Euros to return the bomb, they refuse, and the movie sides squarely against the government. Only in a French film could a government end up portrayed as wimpy and ineffective for refusing to succomb to terrorist demands.