Fun, French and Bloody

By Richard Schickel

Let's put the matter simply: The French thriller District B13 makes everything Hollywood has lately done in the action genre look clumsy, dull and stale. It is a short, nonstop stuntfest that, by going back to basics and placing them on the screen with simple, breathless stylishness, turns what is essentially a lowlife movie form into something one is not embarrassed to call "pure" cinema--all energy, movement and high kinetic wit.

There's a plot of sorts: the time is a few years hence, and the public-housing ghettos, petri dishes for the car-burning riots that traumatized Paris last fall, have been turned into official ghettos, requiring a pass to enter or leave and ruled by gangs. A guy named Leito (David Belle) runs afoul of one of them, and his sister is abducted and enslaved by its comically malevolent leader (Bibi Naceri). Meanwhile, a WMD has gone missing somewhere in B13, and a cop named Damien (Cyril Raffaelli) makes common cause with Leito to retrieve it.

The film is written by Luc Besson, the darkly innovative--sometimes too much so--director of films like La Femme Nikita, and directed by longtime cameraman Pierre Morel. Raffaelli and Belle are veteran stuntmen, and their scenes are overcranked--150 frames a second instead of the usual 24--with the pace then slowed down in postproduction to achieve an extraordinarily graceful effect. When they fight, which is often, the editing is superb, with the cuts landing precisely on action and reaction. It's amazing how these simple devices, used intermittently in other films, energize District B13. The film never pauses to gather its forces for a set-piece action sequence. The whole damned thing is a set piece.

The faint of heart should be warned. The film's body count is inordinate. But this is guaranteed: you will not be able to take your eyes off the screen. And whatever grander ambitions they may harbor, that is what movies are about.