District B-13
“Drugs? No, no, these are bath salts. I always carry a suitcase full of them. By the way, don’t you knock?”
Darn those French! Everything they do is cool—even something as hackneyed as mixing elements of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, The Fast and the Furious and The Matrix into a derivative action flick about a futuristic Parisian ghetto ruled by gangs. This is thanks in large part to the film’s two charismatic leads: Cyril Raffaelli as the clean-cut cop sent to defuse a bomb hidden in District B-13 and David Belle as the streetwise B-13 native sprung from prison to help. As the bomb’s timer counts down, the duo triumphantly negotiates thrilling fight sequences, mounds of cocaine, and plenty of gunplay and car chases. Yeah, you’ve seen it all before (with the possible exception of “The Yeti”) but this movie, directed by Pierre Morel from a script by Bibi Naceri and Luc Besson, does it right.
