Ghetto Blast

Reviewed - District 13/Banlieu 13: 'FROM the mind of Luc Besson," the District 13 trailer dramatically proclaims, although that mind hardly had to spend much time devising the slender scenario that drives this adrenaline-pumping action movie. The setting is 2010, in a banlieu of Paris where crime is so out of control that the police have declared it a no-go area, building a wall all around it to keep the criminals inside.

One of the few remaining law-abiding residents is a vigilante (David Belle) introduced as he destroys a haul of drugs stolen from the criminal kingpin (played by Bibi Naceri, who shares script credit with Besson). Cue one of the most vigorous and exciting chases in the history of cinema, as Belle demonstrates extreme athleticism and acrobatics, racing through windows and apartments, up, down and over staircases, and from roof to roof.

Belle, who resembles a more muscular Colin Farrell, was 15 when he helped devise the urban sport Parkour, a form of freestyle action and movement in which a building is never regarded as an obstacle but as a challenge to be scaled. When the movie leaps forward by six months, Belle meets his match in stuntman Cyril Raffaelli, cast as a dogged undercover cop assigned to recover a prototype nuclear bomb that has been stolen and to wait inside the ghetto for the highest bidder.

District 13 was filmed in the autumn of 2004, a year before last winter's riots in the deprived housing projects of the Paris suburbs, and some of the more elaborate sequences were shot in Romania, where it was easier to get authorisation to film them. In several respects, the movie anticipated the real-life civil unrest in Paris, and it is underlain with a deep-rooted cynicism at politicians intent on avoiding the problem.

The first feature film directed by Pierre Morel, who was the cinematographer on The Transporter, District 13 makes its political points firmly while remaining passionately committed to its raison d'etre. Morel picks up the pace of his lithe actors and sustains it all the way, capturing the dazzling, gravity-defying feats performed with such elan and balletic grace by Belle, Raffaelli and their fellow stuntmen. This deliriously entertaining movie packs more energy into its lean running time than all the recent mega-budget, CGI-driven Hollywood efforts.