DISTRICT 13 Film Review - 21/7/06

Strangely enough this film was made in 2004 and is only now getting a limited cinema release here in the UK in 2006 - Presumably because it's a Foreign film with subtitles. Unfortunately the version I saw had some excruciating dubbing which I initially thought was a piss take until I realised they were being serious. The guy who played the character of The Yeti even had his Gallic tones dubbed with "UUURRRRGGGHHHH!" "EEEuuuurrggghhh" in some sort of strangled grunt and the leads got voiced by what sounded like a chav off the local estate for the copper and the other as a Scotsman, we also got some awful Mexican accents and a few American ones - Again presumably to sound sort of cosmopolitan and unusual; but actually in reality more of a farce and a tears-streaming-down-the-face kind of laugh. I would have preferred subtitles - I've never found that they detract from a film and the original language spoken is much better; hence the undubbed "Nikita" over the awful dubbed version.
From that quibble aside this is a pretty good film. It's original title being "Banlieue 13" and then variations of; such as "District B13" and so on. From the opening of the film we are introduced to the discipline of Parkour or badly translated into English as Free-running and although I had heard of this a few years ago I had never seen it in action and boy in practice it's absolutely jaw dropping. One of the founders star's in the film as Leito (David Belle) and we get a fantastic chase sequence with this guy and others literally bouncing off walls, staircases, corridors, head height and low down, dropping from balconies, floors, roofs and buildings, shooting across metal bars, concrete, you name it they do it - literally stunning.
We get a government plot, stolen weapons, close quarter martial arts, parkour, gunplay, explosions, action, double crosses, revenge - In fact a little of everything in the mix! A relatively better way of spending a couple of hours that puts a lot of Hollywood movies to shame - Just get rid of that awful dubbed soundtrack!