Word: b13
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...Richet, who did the 2005 remake of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, is one of those French directors - Luc Besson (The Professional) and Pierre Morel (District B13) are others - who have renounced the glacial minimalism of their national film style for the wild vigor of American B movies. As briskly as the Mesrine story hurtles through its heists, holdups and hair-breadth escapes, the camera moves faster, but always purposefully. Richet brings all the characters to plausible, entertaining life, but Cassel easily dominates the action. Often, as in Eastern Promises, he plays the strutting punk with more bravado...
...DISTRICT B13...
...that have been imitated in hundreds of movies. But Casino Royale succeeds by taking a modern form of physical activity--parkour, the urban steeplechase in which participants run up stairwells, jump across roofs and slip through transoms that was showcased to exhilarating effect in the French film District B13--and applying it to Bond's pursuit of a bad guy (parkour star Sébastien Foucan) on the high beams of a construction project. Marvelous...
...into official ghettos, requiring a pass to enter or leave and ruled by gangs. A guy named Leïto (David Belle) runs afoul of one of them, and his sister is abducted and enslaved by its comically malevolent leader (Bibi Naceri). Meanwhile, a WMD has gone missing somewhere in B13, and a cop named Damien (Cyril Raffaelli) makes common cause with Leïto to retrieve...
...usual 24--with the pace then slowed down in postproduction to achieve an extraordinarily graceful effect. When they fight, which is often, the editing is superb, with the cuts landing precisely on action and reaction. It's amazing how these simple devices, used intermittently in other films, energize District B13. The film never pauses to gather its forces for a set-piece action sequence. The whole damned thing is a set piece...