District B13 - Reaction

[French]

A decent, mindless action movie with slick stunts. It's about a bomb in a French barrio. Set in the near future. I especially liked that much of the action involved parkour. (One main character is played by one the founders of parkour.) Plus, the occasional slow-motion Matrix-like shots were a nice touch. The film obviously touches on the recent social unrest in the poor districts near Paris.

The DVD itself is remarkably bad.

• The previews were for movies that looked so bad, I'll forever remember the name of the production company and in order to avoid its movies.
• The menu screens on the DVD had what appeared to be bad artwork, like that one sees in a video game, as the background. They could easily have taken an arbitrary frame from the movie and it would've looked better.
• The English dubbed audio was enabled by default. Although it was bad and I switched it off after a few lines, my real complaint here was that this foreign film assumed the viewer wanted to watch the dubbed version. This is the first film I've seen in a long time that made this incorrect presumption.

On the other hand, the DVD's hour-long making-of documentary was quite well done.