One Word Movie

District 13

If you take a shit-boring film like Hidden, and then add in a load of guns, drugs, kung fu and parkour, then you've got District 13, a much more interesting proposition. The plot is a load of guff about a cocaine baron living in a walled-off postcode, who gets hold of a nuclear weapon on a 24-hour countdown. And the only guy who can stop him is the local pk king, who is trying to save his tower block from the evil scourge of gak.

It is ridiculous, and the whole time I was in the cinema I was busting for a piss, but I didn't dare go for fear of missing some brain-popping kung fu / vertical pk ballet - like Jackie Chan used to be, before he got too old and stopped being subtitled. I can imagine this film having a strong DVD afterlife, with pallid teenagers trying to copy the moves, shimmying between piles of dog turd in incandescant white trainers in the loading bay of their local Morrisons.

This film is good, and it also appears to have influenced the recent Porsche-torching riot-spree in France, even to the extent of the film pleb-scum characters getting called racaille by the film Minister for the Interior. But while District 13 has only just opened over here, it was made in 2004. So well done them. Unfortunately the highly trained kung fu parkour gendarmes have not yet materialised but I am sure it will only be a matter of time.

posted by Chairman Peyote @ 4:10 AM