Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

Paul Walker, RZA can’t save ‘Brick Mansions’

“Brick Mansions” is set in a fictional, dystopian Detroit of 2018, or roughly 40 years after actual dystopia took over the real Detroit. “City’s damn near broke,” moans the mayor. If only!

Dystopia’s supposed to be worse than what’s in the papers, fellas. Try to keep up.

Blame the cluelessness on the French DNA of the film, which is a remake of the Luc Besson-produced “District B13,” a far sharper flick that made exciting use of parkour, the art of scurrying up walls like a roach on Mountain Dew and jumping on bad guys’ necks like a malevolent scarf.

The late Paul Walker plays an undercover cop sent to infiltrate the Brick Mansions, a giant housing project set off from the rest of Detroit by a huge wall. (The conceit actually makes sense in France, where projects ring cities like Paris that people don’t want to leave — but not in Detroit, from which anyone with the means to do so already fled.) There’s a neutron bomb hanging around, but if it went off, would it really make that much of a difference? And why don’t the evil developers just use the thousand-megaton power called “eminent domain” to tear down the slums?

Instead of just sneaking the bomb in and setting it off, though, the politically connected villains put a handy timer on it and let it tick down while Walker, a gang lord (RZA) and a crusading anti-drug resident (parkour superstar David Belle, more stuntman than actor) chase each other around.

You could think of the chases as the pearls in a necklace, lazily strung together by a filament-thin story, except in this case the pearls are more like gravel. Spastically directed by Besson’s protégé Camille Delamarre, the film wastes Belle’s talents by frantically chopping up the action to make it look extra-artificial. Things look particularly strange when Walker and Belle are beefing but Delamarre has to keep cutting around to disguise Walker’s stuntman. Why put Belle in the movie at all?

Schlockmeister Besson, who co-wrote the script, throws in typical goofball Keystone Kops touches like having a villain ejected out of a speeding car and onto the floor of the police station. You know you’ve got problems when even “Fast & Furious” fans are thinking: I find that implausible.