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| Review by Benn Robbins |
Carlo Rota, Kwasi Songui, Paskal Monfret
Brick Mansions is not for the Citizen Kane crowd.
What it IS is a perfect miss-mosh of what makes films like Fast & Furious, The Transporter, and Taken work; High frenetic action, crazy stunts and people getting the piss beat out of them.
Add to that a bunch of awesome parkour by co-star David Belle, creator of the discipline, along with The Wu-Tang’s RZA, and you have a fun live-action French comic book set in a dystopian Detroit (like there is another kind).
Written by Luc Besson, (Director of The Fifth Element, The Professional) with frequent collaborator Robert Mark Kamen, Brick Mansions is a non-stop action film featuring revenge, socio-political intrigue and a crap load of kung fu and parkour
Adapted from his original script for the French film District B13, the film is about an unlikely team-up of an undercover cop bent on avenging the death of his father, and a criminal with a heart of gold who is trying to save his sister from a ghetto’s crime lord who isn’t quite whom he seems, played by RZA. Besson has transposed the plot from Paris to Detroit.
In Detroit, crime has gotten so bad that they have walled up the worst ghetto and declared it a no man’s land. The people in there are not allowed to leave and no one from the outside is allowed in, sort of. I say “sort of” because people seem to come and go a lot for a place that is restricted and off limits. I found that elements of the story that seem to have worked when set in Paris don’t work when told in America. That might have more to do with the cultural barriers more than poor writing on Besson’s part.
The film features the last finished work of the late Paul Walker, who was still working on Fast & Furious 7 when he died.
He is basically playing Paul Walker and that is all he needed to be in this film. Walker’s character, Damien, in the original film, was played by french action stuntman and sometimes actor Cyril Raffaelli (last seen by American audiences kicking Bruce Willis’ butt and getting shredded alive in Live Free Or Die Hard as the parkour hopping jackrabbit, Rand).
They get around the fact that Walker isn’t trained in parkour, like Belle, by having him make jokes about it and make fun of him trying to do the crazy stunts Belle does and failing at it.
It works. Though seeing both Raffaelli and Belle do all those stunts themselves in the original is sometimes mind blowing.
The plot is basically RoboCop style future (the good 1980’s RoboCop, not the crappy human hand one that came out earlier this year) with equal parts Escape From New York and buddy cop film.
The film’s only real snag is in it’s director, Camille Delamarre (editor of one of the Transporter films and Taken 2). The editor turned director has a hard time keeping the action fluid and, ironically, the editing smooth and cohesive. At the best of times it is watchable but jarring.
At it’s worst it is a jumble of movement and kinetic action that makes the Blair Witch Project seem like it was shot with a steady cam. It also doesn’t help that the story is pretty farfetched and silly. One that in the hands of a more seasoned director might have been able to wrangle it in a little bit more and not let it go full Crank 2.
If you are looking for a non-stop action film where you can check your brain at the door and just have a fun time then this is your film.
As ridiculous as it was and for all it’s flaws, I thoroughly enjoyed it for what it was, a fun, adrenaline-filled action film.
