"District B13" **1/2 (out of four): Uber-producer Luc Besson churns out another effectively diverting martial arts extravaganza, this one featuring the French fighting discipline Parkour.
The year is 2010 - just enough in the future that Paris might have walled off a section of its city called “District B13”, but not far enough in the future to break a film’s budget on expensive futuristic props or effects. “B13” is run by the sinister Taha (the film’s co-writer Bibi Naceri, a dead ringer for Tim Roth), a cocaine dealer plagued by an idealistic martial arts do-gooder named Leito (David Belle). When one of Taha’s many faceless henchmen describes Leito as “a bar of soap”, that’s an understatement. Using a French discipline called Parkour, which involves fluidly moving around obstacles, Leito dodges, leaps and repels around B13 like a French Spider-Man without the webbing. When Taha kidnaps Leito’s sister Lola (Dany Verissimo, given surprisingly little to do for a female in a Luc Besson script), he teams up with an undercover supercop, Damien (Cyril Raffaelli), to take down Taha once and for all.
