Brick Mansions

Several years ago, a French action movie called District B13 quietly came and went. It wasn’t much, but the action—this was the first movie devoted principally to parkour, or free-running— was novel. Luc Besson produced that film and has given it an astonishingly stupid English-language remake as Brick Mansions. The star attraction here, unfortunately, is the late Paul Walker. More unfortunate is the number of car crashes Walker endures in the film. The parkour remains, courtesy of co-star (and founder of the form) David Belle, but he can’t act worth a damn. The plot involves Detroit walling off a poor, mostly black section of town in the year 2018. A crime lord (RZA) has stolen a nuclear bomb and plans to take out the rest of Motor City from behind the wall. Can Paul Walker and the parkour guy stop him in time? The suspense, surely, is killing you.