District B13 — Ultimatum
Prolific French super-producer Luc Besson — the brains behind The Transporter and its sequels, as well as Taken and other high-octane action flicks — has two films coming out this weekend. The larger of the two, From Paris with Love, hits multiplexes across the country in a standard release strategy and features a big name star (John Travolta). The other, District B13: Ultimatum — a sequel to the parkour-infused District B13 — has a more interesting marketing technique…one that we almost certainly see more of in the future.
But first, the film. Like its predecessor, Ultimatum stars Cyril Raffaelli and David Belle as an incorruptible special forces police officer and an athletic street rat with a heart of gold, respectively. The first film’s plot — revolving around a government official looking to detonate a neutron bomb in a walled-off Parisian ghetto in order to get rid of the hood rats who have the run of the place — was secondary to the stunningaction sequences. Belle is one of the creators of parkour, best described as aggressive walking mixed with high-flying gymnastics and impeccable balance, and his skills gave District B13 a distinctive flavor never before seen on the big screen.
Those parkour sequences aren’t entirely jettisoned in the sequel, but they take a serious backseat to a beefed up plot: Raffaelli’s supercop is framed for narcotics possession in order to keep him from investigating an internal security force who wants to stir up trouble in District B13 so as to convince the president that it’s a powder keg ready and waiting to blow; after setting the fuse by framing a trio of hoods for the murder of a police officer, the corrupt chief will then demolish the public housing projects that dominate the neighborhood so the evil firm “Harriburton” can garner some juicy rebuilding contracts. The ghetto’s various gangs — neo-nazis, dragons, and machete-wielding Africans — must form a coalition of the dispossessed to fight back against this imperialist aggression.
As I’m sometimes wont to say: seriously. That’s what happens.
One gets the sense that director Patrick Alessandrin and writer Besson got a little tripped up when developing this convoluted nightmare, losing track of what brought audiences to love the original film: The action beats are spaced further apart and feel less fluid in their execution. The film doesn’t drag, exactly — it’s hard for a 90 minute film that focuses on a trio of extended martial arts setpieces to ever truly bog down — but it does lose momentum occasionally.
More interesting than the film itself is the way the studio is releasing it: In addition to opening in New York and Los Angeles, Magnolia Pictures is releasing the film on Video On Demand. Indeed, it’s available for viewing right now for a fee. Additionally, one can catch up on the series by watching its initial installment streaming directly to your laptop or television via Netflix. In all likelihood, this is the future of the film experience: Limited theatrical runs combined with streaming video that audiences can enjoy in the comfort of their own home.
What remains to be seen is whether or not this method of distribution will allow studios to recoup their costs. In the case of District B13 — Ultimatum, it probably doesn’t matter as much; this film was already released in Europe, and the odds of the producers garnering much more dough from a French language film in the notoriously subtitles-resistant United States were slim. But Magnolia and other distributors will certainly be watching to see how this picture does monetarily to see just how viable the future of filmmaking is … if this is the future of filmmaking.