This is a fun mindless movie from Luc Besson. Escape-from-New-York-ish with some marginal topical relevance to French social issues, but essentially just an action movie.
On the positive side, unlike most recent Hollywood attempts at showing people fighting, the camera actually stays in a cut at wide angle for at least 2 seconds most of the time, with the remarkable consequence that you can see what is going on. Sure, sure, they cut out frames from various sequences to make them look faster on the screen, but there’s a lot of nifty sequences a la Jackie Chan, albeit with much less humor (though there is some, both intentional and unintentional.) The leads are obviously good athletes of the quirky acrobatic variety. Lots of leaping and tumbling, though they seem to prefer breaking falls with somersaults instead of shoulder rolls, but, hey, it works for them…
On the minus side, the plot makes no sense whatsoever, and despite this the twist is obvious a long way off, but what the heck, no one seeing this movie expects it to make sense. The pacing is fast and hectic and fun, but is not managed very well, so there are odd lulls, and some of the fastest and most exciting action does not occur anywhere near the climax of the story, such as it is. Acting? Ha. As we say in France, “it is to laugh.”
Anyhow, best action movie I’ve seen for some time, despite its many issues.