It's 2013 and Parisian ghetto District 13 has become so dangerous the authorities have walled it in and left its inhabitants to rot. But when a government missile is stolen by a ghetto gangmember, enter super-cop Damien (Cyril Raffaelli) and wrongly-imprisoned ghetto-dweller Leito (David Belle), both hard-as-nails and experts in Le Parkour. Le what? An extreme sport involving wall scaling, roof-running and building-to-building leaping...
It's this adrenalin-pumped discipline that sets this Luc Besson-penned action-comedy apart from Escape From New York and other similar movies... Especially given that some stunts were carried out without CGI and it shows, the action sequences making you gasp. Shame that most of them appear early on and the film struggles to scale such heights again. It could have been this year's Ong-Bak. It's not.
