The best Parisian action movie of the week is “District 13: Ultimatum,” a serviceable thriller with a lefty message.
As in “District 13” (also known as “District B13”), to which this film is a sequel, “D13U” imagines a terrified white Paris literally walled off from black and brown citizens in housing projects. Near the beginning, there is a jaunt through the armed encampments of colorfully seething gangsters — Chinese, Arab, black and neo-Nazi. Later all will join forces. We are the world; we are the children . . .
One honest cop (Cyril Raffaelli) and ghetto-savvy Leito (David Belle, a pioneer of the gymnastic, dash-up-the-walls discipline called parkour) discover a plot by fascist cops to spark a civil war by framing Africans for cop-killing. The cop solution to the project problem: Blow them up and start over.
Luc Besson’s script (he also nabbed story and producer credits on this week’s “From Paris With Love”) marries his B-movie sensibility with appropriately sophomoric political grandstanding, tossing in semi-serious allusions to Gitmo, the Rodney King beating and Iraq: a firm called Harriburton is leading the fight to blow up the projects so it can win the rebuilding contract. Hey, argues an evil cop to the French president: Such destruction will “create jobs.” Sounds as sensible as our stimulus program.
But the lightness of the movie’s touch carries the day, particularly in a lengthy action sequence in a drug den where a cop (disguised as an exotic dancer) loses his pistol but picks up a priceless van Gogh canvas — which he protects and uses as a weapon at the same time.
Only in Paris, kids, only in Paris.