Brick Mansions

Dustin: 1.5 of 5 stars Nick: 1.5 of 5 stars Average: 1.5 of 5 stars (Canary on life support)

Dustin: This week Nick and I had a wager over which movie we would review. At the beginning of the week, we looked at which movies would be opening wide Friday and considered which would be the least unappealing. My choice was The Other Woman as it stars Kate Upton in a bikini. Nick’s choice was Brick Mansions as it is a remake of District B13. We decided to wait until Friday morning to see which movie had the higher rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Brick Mansions won out at 36 percent to The Other Woman’s 25 percent. However, there were no winners in this wager, only losers.

Dustin: Brick Mansions is a parkour movie about an undercover cop who goes to the projects because parkour. He teams up with parkour athlete David Belle and parkour happens.

Nick: David Belle is actually one of the founders of parkour! While District B13 is easy on editing, Brick Mansions ruins almost every stunt with its flashy style of editing. Every stunt looks fake because every time someone jumps, two to four separate shots are shown instead of letting the stunt entertain all by itself.

Dustin: Couldn’t agree more! This is a movie that was ruined in editing. Given the thin plot, this movie needed the stunts to carry it. I’m sure David Belle is a great athlete, and his stunts were amazing. They just weren’t filmed properly. One jump will be shown from three different angles. We never see a “complete” stunt. It was a very frustrating movie-going experience.

Nick: Brick Mansions does humanize its bad guys a little more than District B13, which sounds like a positive but B13 knows what it is and therefore its villains never become more than a cartoon.

Dustin: I didn’t think the villains were really fleshed out here. The RZA turned out not to be completely evil, but it was still pretty goofy, and anyone with half a brain would have figured out the mayor was the real villain from the get-go.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, the plot is a little more involved that I let on in the intro. Paul Walker plays an undercover cop who goes into a walled-off section of very-near-future Detroit to catch the drug kingpin (RZA) who killed his father. There, he teams up with accused cop-killer Lino (David Belle), to get to RZA. There is a ticking-clock element (literally) as RZA has gotten his hands on a nuclear device that he plans to launch into the heart of Detroit.

It was established early in the movie the mayor plans to build real estate in the current location of the “Brick Mansions”--a euphemism for the projects which have been walled off to contain the criminal elements within them. He pronounces sinisterly, “I’ll take care of ALL the residents of Detroit,” or something to that effect. So when a nuclear device conveniently and mysteriously falls into the hands of the RZA, it doesn’t come as much of a twist when they reveal it was the mayor who let this happen. SPOILER! (sorry)

Nick: Mansions does inform early on that the mayor is the true bad guy, unlike its predecessor. This reminded me of the film Watchmen where Ozymandias has a certain evil about him, whereas in the graphic novel he seems the least likely candidate.

I feel as if I never point out racial stereotypes in films as they are normally overblown, but this film feels a tad “racist” on the casting side. Did that ever come to your mind?

Dustin: Not particularly. In what sense did you think it was racist?

Nick: Not the movie itself, but the idea behind how they casted the film. Everyone in a suit was white. This stat is just how I felt, but 90 percent of the gangsters were ethnicities other than white, and the white gangsters were borderline mentally handicapped.

Dustin: Well, that is pretty much accurate of the present demographics of Detroit. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Detroit is 10.6 percent white, so if 90 percent of the characters in the movie are not white, that is actually realistic.

source: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/26/2622000.html

But you’re right, the characters who weren’t Paul Walker or David Belle were either evil, idiotic, or both.

Nick: I looked up the Census before I made the remark, but my problem with that is if 80 percent of Detroit is black, then why in the early scenes could there not have been a black man at the table with the mayor’s entourage? They were all white men.

Dustin: I think that was an intentional casting choice. I think the director or producer was making a statement about “the Man.”

Nick: Well my comment was about the casting, so, yeah, I also think it was intentional, but I don’t think this movie had much of a statement.

Dustin: It could have been a statement, or it could have been falling back on a cliche. Hard to tell with this movie.

Nick: Did you feel the last sequence in the movie was added to the film after Paul Walker passed away? The one where he goes back to his grandfather’s and they share a hug, then the film immediately ends with a memorial to Walker.

Dustin: I didn’t really think about it. It was set up fairly early in the movie that Paul Walker and his grandfather should come to some sort of understanding, so I thought that fit in with the narrative. If I didn’t know Walker had died right after the filming, I wouldn’t have thought it unusual or shoehorned in. Given that this scene was filmed with Walker, my guess is it was meant to be in the movie from the beginning.

Nick: But many things are shot that don’t make it into a movie. Both of those scenes lasted about five minutes altogether. I’m thinking it wouldn’t have made it into the movie if Walker had lived. At no other point in the film is a grandpa mentioned. So with two easy clicks those two scenes could be scrapped and nothing would have changed.

Dustin: I don’t know, the scene with the grandfather is where they revealed Walker’s father was a cop who was killed by RZA, and where he says once he brings down this one last bad guy, he’ll quit. This was all cliche, but it was the only scene that gave Walker’s character a motive.

Nick: I thought that was instilled earlier with his talks with the chief and his wall of bad guys he is knocking off while there sits a picture of his dad he longingly looks at.

Dustin: This movie is more enjoyable if you just turn your brain off. The violence was so cartoonish it was almost insulting. For example, Lino’s girlfriend gets punched in the face so hard it knocks her unconscious, but the next time they show her, she doesn’t have a mark on her face. She gets roughed up a little more, and we see she has a bump on her forehead, or maybe just a little dirt. There are no consequences to violence. In another scene, one of the bad guys gets thrown from a car Walker crashes into a concrete barrier, the bad guy flies through the windshield and through a glass window. He lands on the ground and only has a small cut on his head and he even moves a little, showing Walker isn’t a murderer. There isn’t even damage to the body of the car. Given that Walker died under similar circumstances, to show someone survive such a crash with barely a scratch is borderline offensive.

Nick: Your complaint, while spot on, happens in every single movie where one of the main characters gets hurt, but by the next day they are just fine. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 had many instances of this--though not as bad as a man flying through a windshield and still being conscience.

This movie should definitely be skipped as District B13 is available on Netflix, or if you know me, it is readily available from me. I’ll be there hitting your leg being like, “Did you see that?!” knowing full well you did. Though you will probably just want to borrow it…

Dustin: I’d recommend this movie to anyone who thinks shots lasting more than 1.5 seconds are boring and likes fight scenes with no establishing shots to give you an idea of what the hell is going on and really fast cutaways in fight scenes where you can’t actually see anyone get hit and you only know they were hit because you heard a punch sound. Pretty much the same audience as Taken 2.

Nick:  KAPOW!

Dustin: This video is better than Brick Mansions: