At the whirling-dervish center of the French action film "District B13" is a fighting discipline known as parkour. I'm pretty sure that's French for "somersaulting over balconies while drop-kicking the gangsters who kidnapped your sister and turned her into a junkie." However it translates, parkour isn't par-for-the-course movie mayhem, but a gorgeously choreographed gymnastics of pain that elevates "District B13" over the impossible missions and last stands of the season.（）

Cyril Raffaelli stars, deliciously shirtless, as Damien, a righteous denizen of the grungy Parisian suburb District B13. By 2010 crime, misery and hairstyles have grown so extreme that the authorities have shuttered the schools, withdrawn the police and sealed off the district with a fortified wall. Lording over it all is the sneering, cocaine-addled crime boss Taha (Bibi Naceri), who doesn't take kindly to Damien's flushing a million Euros worth of his dope down the drain.

Complications ensue when a massive government bomb finds its way into the slum. Enter Le?to (David Belle), a supercop with shaved armpits sent to retrieve the activated weapon. Teaming up with Damien, he vaults into the fray, only to discover that his noble mission may be a nefarious bourgeois plot to eradicate the lower classes. Spectacular set pieces and reductive politics follow.

With backing from the film's producer and co-writer, Luc Besson, the director, Pierre Morel, mounts a breakneck B movie inspired by Hong Kong action extravaganzas, the gritty genre classics of John Carpenter and the Thai neo-kung fu parable "Ong Bak." He hasn't reinvented this particular wheel, but he gets it spinning with delirious savoir-faire.