Brick Mansions Review

An anecdote, if you will: before the French actioner District B-13 was released stateside, a kiosk at the local mall boasted a fresh bootleg copy of the film, alongside other martial arts/action pictures freshly on disc. There were bigger names on some of these DVDs, but the display television showed two extended sequences, on a loop, from District B-13. And I, the helpless action fan that I am, kept finding new convenient excuses to walk by, stop, and watch free-running expert David Belle elude capture from a sea of thugs in a run-down tenement.

The unfortunate news is that Brick Mansions, the American remake, has no sequences that I would go out of my way to watch on a loop. How could it? That was part of the hot wave of French action, which took director Pierre Morel stateside and made producer Luc Besson his own small cottage industry of low budget, high-concept action. At the very least, however, the central hook of the film translates like gangbusters: criminals in a depleted, low-income, crime-ridden area have a nuke, and the city sends their best cop into the scrum to get it back.

This time it's Detroit 2018, which oddly enough doesn't look much worse than Detroit 2014, so maybe it's an optimistic film? In the original, both heroes were parkour experts, but this time the film's gotten a movie star upgrade by the late Paul Walker. Bless Walker, as one of the actor's greatest talents was his innate gravity. Rarely did you believe this cartoonishly good looking man was the guy he claimed to be, but he always found a way to render everything he touched real, including the ludicrous Fast and Furious stunts. In this film, he's one of those movie cops, one who breaks the rules and causes excessive damage, but always gets his man. The wall in his apartment is littered with glossy 8 x 10's of the city's criminal underworld. You sense he's got binders of crooks to replace the ones he takes down.

Walker teams with Belle, here more or less reprising his role from the original. He's still casually handsome, and still lithe in combat, but he's at the mercy of American filmmaking. The worst sin a director can commit is making an inadequate Xerox, and many of his scenes are copied shot-by-shot from District B-13. Unfortunately, first-timer Camille Delamarre manages to feature additional coverage for every jump and kick, distorting events and robbing Belle of his physical grace. Perhaps this is a way to keep world-class athlete Belle and “regular” athlete Walker on the same level. When the camera cuts away as they complete dueling standing back-flips, it's kind of insulting to the original movie.

Both are on the trail of Tremaine, a kingpin who has holed up inside of Brick Mansions, an area of Detroit completely neglected by the government. Tremaine offers the city a $30 million refund for the nuke – they turn it down, which will no doubt amuse the Detroit Pistons fans who just saw their team sign Josh Smith for $54 million and proceed to have one of the worst statistical seasons in NBA history. Because the film is PG-13, Tremaine is never actually seen dealing drugs, which makes it easier to buy his brush-off, “It's just politics, and I'm a politician.” When he says, “cash rules everything around me,” it's almost like a campaign slogan. The audience also goes wild because Tremaine is played by The RZA. After Ice Cube in Ride Along, this is the second time this year when a ‘90s rapper has co-opted their exact verses, one playing a cop, one playing a criminal. Food for thought.

There's a great action movie to be made of the fact that American politicians criminalize the lower class, which is how Walker begins to suspect he's become the fall guy. This isn't quite that, and Brick Mansions falters when it becomes overly didactic, leaning on naïve sentiments of black hats and white hats. This sledgehammer critique would work if we knew there was a corporate benefit to Brick Mansions disappearing off the face of the Earth, if the PG-13 violence gave way to R-rated cynicism. Brick Mansions, which is also written by Luc Besson, feels compromised, and not just in the cutaways from characters screaming, “Motherf-.” Then again, indictment isn't what the film is about, but rather compromise. This isn't Occupy Wall Street as much as Find Common Ground With Wall Street.

If only that were the same approach towards the female characters. Contemporary films have recently shied away from leering and objectifying female characters, but Brick Mansions brings that back in a hurry. Belle's girlfriend is kidnapped by Tremaine's men while working as a waitress, and her miniskirt is frequently hiked up, exposing and admiring her upper legs when the camera isn't lingering over her bust – Delamarre is an “equal opportunity offender” by giving the same treatment to the villains' head female henchman, who seems to only be wearing an elaborate form of underwear. And we only see Walker's girlfriend from behind, walking into a room. She is literally just an ass. Is it progress because sexism isn't overtly as problematic here as it was in District B-13, or is it a black mark considering there are more female characters this time around, all of whom are ogled?

That odiousness becomes easier to ignore for most audiences because of the wholesomeness of Walker. As he was nearing 40, he was really coming into his own, that magazine cover smile earning appreciative creases from a good life. In Brick Mansions he smiles more than usual, having a great time in spite of the ticking clock narrative. He wasn't unlike a young Burt Reynolds, a good-time guy who could liven up any dim studio film just by grinning: is it snobbery that kept George Clooney and Brad Pitt from calling him up to run with their gang of socially-minded dreamboats? Brick Mansions closes with a clumsy segue to a cheap stock photo of the star, the words “In Loving Memory Of Paul Walker” underneath. It looks homemade, YouTube quality. In capping his career with a film suggesting the 99 percent and the 1 percent could eventually live in harmony, it's a touching moment nonetheless.

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