Brick Mansions **½ (2014, Paul Walker, David Belle) – Movie Review

Brick Mansions is dedicated ‘In loving memory of Paul Walker’ before the end credits. That’s cause for lots of tears and heartache among his zillions of fans.

It would be great to report that this, his final completed film, makes a fine, quality epitaph to a fine, quality man, but unfortunately  it’s only a very moderate action thriller. Still, as Z-grade, B-movies go, this is absolutely acceptable, exciting disposable entertainment. It’s like a supermarket value pack of a posher, more expensive item. You’re OK with it, it does provide value for money, but you kind of wish you’d splashed out on the other one.

Walker stars as an undercover cop in a futuristic, run-down dystopian Detroit, where he has to infiltrate a dangerous neighbourhood surrounded by a containment wall to take down gangs that are at work. And do something about a crime lord and that pesky rocket launcher he’s got pointed at the city, which will blow the whole darned thing up if the dodgy mayor doesn’t do whatever he’s supposed to do.

The story’s functional, though since writer-producer Luc Besson has already used it a couple of times in French movies (District B13 and District 13: Ultimatum), you’d have thought he might have perfected it a bit. Of course, there’s no point even in mentioning this, because the plot is only a peg to hang the action on, and the action is red hot in the hands of a very fit 40-year-old Walker and David Belle as the ex-con he falls in with.

Belle is the French-born founder of Parkour, as well as an actor, film choreographer and stunt coordinator, and he’s 40 too, and all too obviously struggling with his English. Screenplay writers Luc Besson and Bibi Naceri are French too. So probably for these language reasons, the witty banter between the two protagonists is basic in the extreme and only rarely funny.

And Walker (as Damien) and Belle (as Lino) don’t form a partnership that has any compelling chemistry, or really much chemistry at all. Alas, Damien and Lino was never going to go down like Brian O’Conner and Dominic Toretto. The characters in Brick Mansions are even more basic than the plot and there’s no character development, other than that they fight, shoot, kill, then mostly die.

Damien and Lino survive the general bloodbath of course. They are the film’s heroes and weird oddball moral centre. So no surprises there then. In fact, no surprises and no originality anywhere here, and that’s probably the main problem.

Nevertheless, as action movie formula film-making, Brick Mansions is, like the life of man, nasty, brutish and short. It’s fast moving, occasionally exciting and always at least entirely adequate. It’s never boring. You never look at your watch. The under-90 minutes of brain-in-neutral thrills go by in a flash.

However, it really is not easy to watch Paul Walker crashing cars into stuff right now. RIP lovely man Paul.

(C) Derek Winnert 2014

http://derekwinnert.com/the-fast-and-the-furious-classic-film-review-311/

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/