"District B13": Free-flying actors set a new level for action in French thriller

Tom Cruise invited ridicule with his recent offscreen behavior, and after you've seen "District B13," his recent onscreen antics won't seem so impressive, either. Compared with the stars of this raucous French thriller, Cruise looks like a wimp in a safety harness.

Set in the near future and borrowing its premise from John Carpenter's "Escape from New York," this fast-paced fight-fest (a European hit in 2004) is the brainchild of producer/co-writer Luc Besson, the action auteur who's become a one-man industry for bullet ballets and high-gloss adventure.

Movie review

Showtimes and trailer

"District B13," with Cyril Raffaelli, David Belle, Tony D'Amario, Bibi Naceri. Directed by Pierre Morel, from a screenplay by Luc Besson and Bibi Naceri. 85 minutes. In French with English subtitles. Not rated; contains violence, language. Several theaters.

With cinematographer Pierre Morel making an assured directorial debut, this is easily the best action film of the year so far, serving as both response and challenge to 2003's "Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior," in which Thai stuntman Tony Jaa raised the bar on martial-arts mastery.

Like that film, "District B13" dispenses with wire-rigging and digital trickery, elevating stuntmen Cyril Raffaelli and David Belle to leading-men status and letting their Spider-Man agility speak for itself. Both are breathtakingly impressive, but it's Belle's invention of "parkour" — a philosophy of action based on total mobility in an urban environment — that will leave viewers awestruck.

American action stars will be hard-pressed to match this welcome return to pure physicality, which finds Belle and Raffaelli leaping around buildings like gymnasts in the inner-city Olympics.

Paris, 2010: In the walled-off and utterly lawless ghetto of District B13, Leito (Belle) has lost his sister to kidnapping gangsters led by coke-snorting psychotic Taha (played with delicious villainy by co-writer Bibi Naceri).

To get her back, he reluctantly teams up with Damien (Raffaelli), an elite-force cop assigned to retrieve a potentially devastating neutron "clean bomb" that's fallen into Taha's possession. Two men against dozens, with an official conspiracy to raise the stakes ... guess who wins?

It's obviously not this juvenile plot that matters but the sheer velocity, precision and humor of its execution. While Morel makes expert use of varying camera speeds and nimble composition, his stars turn "District B13" into the Cirque du Soleil of action extravaganzas, energized with buddy-film sarcasm and the kind of heightened realism that's become a Luc Besson trademark. It's all over in 85 minutes, and action fans will be begging for more.

Jeff Shannon: j.sh@verizon.net