Not fit to smell the French original’s shit, Brick Mansions fails in just about every way possible.

In the future, Detroit gets so bad that an entire building project known as Brick Mansions is walled off from the rest of the city and left to be run by criminals and is largely ignored by the rest of the city. For the Mayor (Bruce Ramsay),  Brick Mansions is a malignant tumor in the middle of a city full of promise and he wants to knock all of it down and develop a new area of town altogether. Of course, in order to do that he needs to deal with Brick Mansions, which is currently under control of an ex-military man turned drug Kingpin Tremaine Alexander (RZA) and who has hijacked a bomb. The Mayor enlists the help of undercover cop Damien Collier (Paul Walker) and insider/criminal do gooder Lino (David Belle) to go in and disarm the bomb and bring Tremaine down.

Usually when dealing with remakes I try to take the movie on its own merits and not compare the two but it is kind of hard here. The original French film, District B13 (or Banlieue 13 if you want to be technical) was made back in 2004 and was awesome. The story was pretty much the same, with one really big difference to the ending, and as such was just as ridiculous as it was here but it was executed much, much better. In fairness, it has been several years since I have seen District B13 so I may have rose colored glasses on but I distinctly remember not ever thinking that it was complete horseshit and wanting to storm out of the room.

A lot of the problems with Brick Mansions come from the writing and when I say that I don’t mean the story. The dialogue is some of the worst I have heard in years with characters spouting off one liners back and forth meant to make them look cool, detached badasses but it comes off sounding corny and ridiculous. Some editing issues make the conversations seem abrupt and unnatural as well but mostly it is the things people say that completely undermine any amount of tension or real concern for any of the characters.

What this smacks of more than anything is trying to make this more ‘American’ and it comes off sounding so tone deaf and lowest common denominator that it gets to be insulting after awhile. Americans really don’t need things to be dumbed down like this to enjoy them and the insinuation that we do really annoys me. That being said, judging by the reaction of some of the audience around me, maybe I am in the wrong here.

Aside from dialogue there are some character and story turns here that make no sense and the way it all ends up is absolutely asinine. I don’t want to get into spoilers here but the flip flopping of some characters at the end to completely ignore the earlier events of the film really undermines whatever shred of credibility the story had and frankly it wasn’t working with a lot to begin with. That events unfold in a silly and ridiculous manner only makes matters worse. I could go on and talk about the pacing and editing but there are bigger fish to fry. Just know that they are bad.

All of the things I mention above really shouldn’t matter much. I know they are all important but at the end of the day, with a movie like Brick Mansions, I shouldn’t be thinking about that at all because I am too busy being excited and impressed by the action scenes. This is an action movie and the Raid taught us that if you have amazing action scenes then you really don’t need the story and character development all that much. Hell, that movie barely had any dialogue in it. I mentioned that Brick Mansions follows the same story as District B13 and that I loved that movie a lot. Why? Because it had amazing action scenes in it and was exciting to watch.

The action here is the real crime. We get one cool parkour scene in the beginning and then a few scenes of complete nonsense made up of a patchwork of traditional fight scenes, car chases and a little bit of jumping.  It was all very standard action movie nonsense that didn’t try even a little to be interesting. This is especially true of the driving scenes as we are six movies deep into the Fast and the Furious series and directors still think they can half ass this shit? Just having Paul Walker in the movie does not make the car chases awesome.  Now that I mention it, the number of times we see Paul Walker’s character crash his car into something at high speeds was a bit disturbing, especially when the film was dedicated to his memory. I am not saying that to be snarky or funny, I found it to be upsetting and in poor taste.

The biggest mystery here is how the movie went so wrong when David Belle reprises his role from the original film and is one of the originators of parkour. The reason I was hopeful that this would be good is because Belle is amazing and the original is a showcase for parkour that is consistently exciting. As mentioned above, there is one good parkour scene and the rest is bland nonsense. Sure, this film had different choreographers for stunts and fights and we can obviously see which production had the better ones but parkour with David Belle should be automatic. Why hire that guy and then make him do boring things? It makes no sense to me.

The performances were pretty terrible too. I really like Paul Walker and he was usually fun to watch but there is not much he can do here. He usually does pretty well with making hackneyed dialogue sound decent but here there isn’t much to be done. RZA tries to be intimidating but it just doesn’t come off. I am not sure if it is because he sounds like he has a bit of a speech impediment or how it is shot but I never believed that this was a dangerous guy regardless of how many times we see him chopping vegetables calmly while his crew waits to get shot for screwing something up. The rest of the cast gives the same stilted and unnatural performances in service to being tough badasses which falls enormously flat. I lay most of the blame on the director here as opposed to the cast.

Conclusion [2.0 out of 10]

There is really nothing I can recommend about this movie. A friend asked me what was one thing that was good about it and I could only really say that it ended. I don’t want to be unnecessarily harsh or cruel but aside from one good parkour scene and seeing Paul Walker there is really nothing here worth watching. It really isn’t a good bad movie that can be funny on that level. It is just a boring disappointment filled with cliches and amateur craft. There was potential here but it was squandered. Just go watch the original film instead.