It’s like someone made an instagram for movies and then applied the over the top bad action movie filter to this one.
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“Brick Mansions” is a remake of a French movie called District B13 and stars the late Paul Walker as a cop trying to avenge the death of his father in a future version of Detroit that is walled off from the rest of society. The movie combines mile a minute action with the politics of the inner city and comes out a jumbled mess, that feels like a poor imitation of the original.
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Now, certainly many will be curious about seeing Paul Walker in one of his final roles, so lets address him first, he’s good. Not great, but typical Paul Walker, brooding actioneer one minute, smiling joke cracker the next, with not much to really draw you in, but at the same time enough to carry his job. Which in this case is to occasionally advance the plot enough to get to the next Parkour stunt fest, or “free running” as the kids are calling it these days. Where instead of just running away, you climb walls leap through small holes and defy gravity with the greatest of ease. Now don’t get me wrong, this is the part I actually liked about Brick Mansions, the action can be really fun. Right from the beginning there is an escape sequence where one of our leads does some pretty amazing stuff flying through the set with a real creativity and joy. Now I’m not sure the movie ever lives up to that promise again, but every once in a while I found I couldn’t help but smile at how cool some of those wall jumps and gorilla leaps felt on screen.
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Unfortunately, that’s where the fun ended. Because when the stunt running ends the movie gets so bogged down in these long scenes of exposition and explanation that those incredible feats of human agility fade into the recesses of memory pretty quickly. Which would be one thing if the movie actually had a fun or interesting plot to engage in, but instead we have characters explaining things to us that we already know in ways we’ve seen a million times before, all leading to an end with a revelation that felt more like a “duh” than a “Twist”. Not to mention that much of the movie almost seems sloppily put together, leaving it feeling jittery and inconsistent. But the worst thing has to be some of this cheesy dialogue. The movie feels bogged down in trying to say witty and clever things but instead comes off sounding eye rollingly cliche.
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Overall, Brick Mansions is an awful movie with some awfully good action. If you’re up for a possible “so bad it’s good” experience, feel free to go, otherwise you might not want to brave this neighborhood at all. I landed at a C-
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Thanks for checking out this Your Movie Friend review, stay tuned for this review’s “Best Ever” challenge here in bit but first, I’m going to put up some stuff you can click over in this area. If you’d like to subscribe, which I would much appreciate, you can do so by clicking the big gray subscribe button. Want to see more? Here are my reviews of ‘The Quiet Ones” and “The Other Woman”. You can also Click the logo up here to go to yourmoviefriend.com where you can search by title for reviews. And finally this review’s “Best Ever” Challenge, where you name the best movie ever in a particular category and also try to identify my choice. What is the “the best movie with a prominent posthumous role ever”. I think I know most people’s first choice, whether they enjoy watching the world burn or not, so I’ll pick something else. Mine is much older and features in my mind the birth of cool. Drop your own answer and a guess at mine in the comments and first person to guess mine gets a point! Thanks and please subscribe!