Brick Mansions

Look, I'm all for the Paul Walker farewell tour lasting as long as possible. I just watched Sin City for the first time in years where half of the stars are either dead (Brittany Murphy, Michael Clarke Duncan) or may as well be dead (Nick Stahl, Mike Madsen, Clive Owen) and it still rules! Heck, I still buy every Tom Cruise movie that comes out on Blue Ray and he's been dead for years! Come on now, that's not really Cruise, his soul has been dead ever since Jerry Maguire! "What do you want from me? My soul or something?" He wasn't talking to Renee Zellweger in that scene, he was talking to Xenu! And that's who body snatched Cruise and gave us War of the Worlds! That was his warning to us!

I also wish that I could be Luc Besson; make a few good movies that pull at the heartstrings of men by exploiting their innate desire to protect women and their families, get fat and bang supermodels as a result of it, and then recruit scrubs that idolize me to direct my lazy attempts at replicating my previous successes. Instead I'm just getting fat, making fun of people that I idolize for a living, and banging nothing but my drums on the weekend in my storage unit.  Well in the case of Brick Mansion, Besson reaches a new level of laziness by trying to Americanize his rather stellar District B13.

France is a strange strange place! Forget the fact that the national drink is wine and that they charge $100 euros to eat frogs. They have people over there that have created a new phenomenon called Base Jumping. OK, so the French may or may not have invented this but these are the only clowns I know that do it without a parachute! They jump from building to building, or even worse from one building top to another building via its window at a lower distance. As you can imagine, it takes an incredible amount of skill and amphetamines to do this and Brick Mansion star David Belle is an expert at it; so much so that he does most if not all of the stunts himself in the movie. And that's part of what made the original movie so spectacular. Besson actually had a decent story that surrounded these amazing stunts and Belle had a partner in crime that could perform these base jumping feats with him in Cyril Raffaelli.

But in the American remake you have to have someone that will draw us silly Americans to the theater to watch it. Hey, Paul Walker took a few tumbling classes when he was 8, why not snag him? Oh and lets get Black people in the theater too, Old Dirty Bastard is already dead but I hear Rza is available! So there you have it; I love both Paul Walker and Rza but neither of them are great actors. Now I do give Rza credit for making half of his lines old Wu Tang or Bob Marley lyrics but that's not really conducive to making a good movie.

The plot is simple, Paul Walker is an undercover narcotics cop who is working his way up the chain to RZA, the drug kingpin of the blocked off district that the rest of Detroit has forgotten. This district houses all of the cities undesirables and somehow Rza and his crew got their hands on a neutron bomb that can takeout millions of people at once. Due to mishandling it, the bomb is due to go off in 12 hours, so the mayor recruits Walker to work with the district's lone do-gooder Belle to locate and diffuse the bomb.

Not a bad story but once again the execution is where it fails. There isn't nearly enough base jumping in it; they instead rely on some creative gymnastics to compensate for Walker's limitations and that's not nearly as cool. I've already noted that the acting is awful in it but they did replace the original's porn star with a hot Colombian, so that was an upgrade. Overall, it loses the spirit of the original and its not strong enough to stand on its own. It feels more the edited for tv version of the original and comes off as a cheesy episode of Hawaii Five-O.

I rate it as WEAK and suggest you pass on this. Paul Walker for life though!