Banlieue 13 (2004)
aka:
B13; District 13; District B13
Starring: David Belle, Cyril Raffaelli, Tony D'Amario,
Dany Verissimo, Larbi Naceri, François Chattot, Nicolas Woirion, Patrick
Olivier
Director: Pierre Morel
Action Director: Cyril Raffaelli
When 2004 rolled around, Hong Kong action cinema was still drifting in the doldrums, even if its influence was still being felt on the other side of the Pacific Ocean in Hollywood. Nonetheless, fans of hard-hitting, stunt-driven action were now turning their attention to Thailand, with the revelation of Tony Jaa[1] in Ong Bak the previous year. At about the same time, the French were making inroads into the martial arts action scene, first with the Luc Besson-produced, French-produced Kiss of the Dragon (2001), and then with the Corey Yuen-directed/choreographed The Transporter (2002). Banlieue 13 continued the trend, but innovated the scene by integrating the art of parkour into the martial arts sequences.
Parkour should be familiar to most of my readers by this point, especially in the 18 years following the release of Banlieue 13, which itself has seen both a sequel and a Hollywood remake, Brick Mansions. Actor/choreographer Cyril Raffaelli played a parkour-using henchman in Live Free and Die Hard (2007), while the discipline was the basis for an unforgettable action sequence in the James Bond movie Casino Royale (2006). It has since entered our vernacular: whenever my daughter plays any game that requires the player to jump from ledges or multiple platforms—usually in a hurry or with a certain degree of strategy—she says that the characters are performing parkour.
French soldier Raymond Belle was the main forerunner of the discipline, who spent his nights in Vietnam (then Indochina) climbing trees and finding news ways to best the military’s obstacle courses. His son, David, was originally an athlete and a gymnast and grew disaffected with traditional sports. Upon learning of his father’s training in Vietnam, which Raymond had called parcours, David made it his mission to essentially develop it into a real discipline. Inspired by Hong Kong action movies (specifically Jackie Chan), Van Damme films, Bruce Lee, and anime, they started creating physical challenges and finding ways to run, jump, climb, roll and flip their way through them[2]. David Belle’s group called itself Yamakasi, which was also the name of a 2001 starring members of the group as cat burglars.
The movie is set in the far-flung future of 2010 (heh), where certain ghettoes in Paris, like Banlieue 13, have become so overrun with crime that they basically walled off from the rest of the city. Police stations are set up at the entry points to ensure that nobody leaves the district without their consent. This is where we meet our main character, Leïto (David Belle, who also starred in the Hollywood remake), who sort of runs an apartment complex in the district. He has come across a large quantity of cocaine belonging to crime boss Taha (Larbi Naceri, who wrote this film). Leïto is in the middle of washing the cocaine down the bathtub drain when Taha’s enforcers, led by K2 (Tony D’Amario), show up to reclaim what is theirs. K2 and his men dispatch with Leïto’s guards, mainly thanks to the latter being idiots, and storm the place. David Belle escapes with his life thanks to his awesome roof-jumping skills.
Taha is not particularly happy with his men’s failure to recover the drugs. And when Taha is not happy…people DIE! He is executing his men one by one until K2 comes up with the idea of kidnapping Leïto’s sister, Lola (Dany Verissimo), who has a normal job in this crime-ridden hellhole as a grocer. Lola is particularly feisty, and Taha doesn’t have much time to do anything with her before Leïto literally drops in on him and both frees his sister and makes a citizen’s arrest on Taha. Unfortunately, the police captain in charge of the District 13 precinct is retiring the next day. To make his transition easier, he locks up Leïto and lets Taha go with Lola in hand. Leïto responds by pulling the man’s head through the bars and breaking his neck, thus winning him a one-way ticket to prison.
Six months later, undercover police officer Damien Tomaso (Cyril Raffaelli, who fought Jet Li at the climax of Kiss of the Dragon) receives the mission to infiltrate District 13. Apparently, an armored truck was stolen and taken into Taha’s custody. If the truck had just been carrying money, that would be one thing. But this particular truck’s cargo was a friggin neutron bomb. And apparently there is a mechanism on the bomb that would arm the bomb the moment anyone opened the case…which Taha did. So now Damien has 23 hours to storm the most dangerous district in Paris, find the bomb (wherever it may be hidden), and disarm it. Sounds like a tall order, right? That’s where Leïto comes in. Damien will need someone who knows the district like the back of his hand, and who better to help him bring down Taha than the guy who turned kidnapped his sister and turned her into a junkie.
There is quite a bit of entertainment to be derived from watching Cyrill Raffaelli and David Belle in action. It almost feels like Jackie Chan had undergone complete organism-scale cell division and produced two Frenchmen. David Belle would represent the running, jumping and general stuntwork portion of Chan, while Raffaelli would be the martial arts/fighting portion (although he’s no slouch in the acrobatics department, either). We’re only a few minutes into the film when Belle is given his first action sequence, which has him running, jumping, climbing, flipping, diving, rolling, and God-knows-what-else’ing his way through an apartment complex and is adjoining buildings. The man’s athleticism brings to mind some of Jackie Chan’s better stunt-driven moments, like Project A 2. He certainly is on par with the work Tony Jaa was doing at the same time.
On the other hand, Raffaelli gets a handful of opportunities to show off his fighting skills. Most notable is his introductory scene, where he fights off a racketeer’s men in an underground casino, using all sorts of acrobatic kicks, flips, and guns as well. The now-defunct Wasted Life website ranked this sequence #60 of the 100 best fight scenes of all time. Wrote John Richards[3]:
“This scene towers above any of the action in the rest of the film (which is all still fantastic by the way). As Damian (Cyril Raffaelli) singlehandedly takes down a Casino full of gun-wielding gangsters we get an awesome display of martial arts thats very nearly a match for 'Ong Bak' in terms of brutality and the agility of its main protagonist. Mixed in is a crazy barrage of gunplay sequences as attackers continually seem to come out of nowhere. Coolest bit is where Cyril slides under a gaming table while simultaneously shooting upwards to take out the villain stood over him.”
I would say that the main problem of this movie is that none of the action ever quite matches up to those introductory set pieces. There are a number of car chases, foot chases, and shorter fights—including a disappointing one against a mountain-of-flesh appropriately named Yeti (Unleashed’s Jeff Rudom)—but nothing on the level of the carnage we see in the first act. Generally speaking, the final fight should be the hardest or most brutal, even if it’s not the most creative or elaborate. We do get a brief scuffle between Belle and Raffaelli, but I was expecting a little more.
That said, the rest of the movie is fine. The story plays like Escape from New York filtered through the eyes of an 80s Hong Kong action movie, which is a fine way to structure you movie. The main characters are likable and seem to have a good rapport with each other. I liked Lola’s no-nonsense female character, although after her great introduction, she’s mainly a strung-out heroin addict with minimal dialog. I like that she does try to stop the missile in her own way, though. It’s not a total loss, but I think more could have been done with her character. The villains are appropriately quirky and fun to watch, and Taha gets dispatched in a way that I honestly did not see coming. Nonetheless, the action on the whole is done well enough that I can see how it got both a Hollywood remake and Cyrill Raffaelli several gigs there, too.
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