There is a common belief that just before a swan dies it sings a most beautiful melody, enough to lay rest to all your fears and sadness if you were to hear it. This belief has caused the phrase ‘swan song’ to be associated with the final, life-defining art created by bands, artists and actors before they die. Here we have Brick Mansions, which is less the song of a swan but the vaginal sting of some thrush. Let’s just hope Fast and Furious 7 can be a more fitting final performance for Paul Walker.
The film is produced and written by Luc Besson and is a remake of the french film, District 13, which is incredible and very well directed. You would be surprised to find out that the same man wrote Brick Mansions and District 13, and both also stars the same parkour legend David Belle. In fact sometimes the scenes are almost identically shot, and yet they still managed to ruin a perfectly good film to the point of hilariousness.
In the not too distant future, a part of Detroit gets sectioned off because it is full of bad people. RZA, from being-terrible-at-acting fame, is in charge of this micro-city and is a force to be reckoned with; he can philosophise lazily while chopping peppers and if that doesn’t scare you he has people who are afraid of him because of the murders he does off camera. He seems, as does everyone else in the film, to have stage fright when it comes to murders, as not a single person receives a direct bullet on camera. Brick Mansions is not just about RZA, oh no; Lino (Belle) has upset some people because of stealing some drugs that RZA had been selling and Damien Collier (Walker) enters Brick Mansions so he can arrest RZA for killing Collier’s father and to disarm a bomb that RZA has accidentally activated.
All the action’s at the start of this film, and it’s awful, they cut so fast that you can’t focus on it despite the fact that we know Belle can actually perform all the moves Delamarre is trying to imply he is doing. They even add in a CGI brick when Walker and Belle throw a brick, which they easily could have done in real life. They slow everything down in an attempt to make uninteresting things interesting but end up making it tedious. The film becomes an absolute farce, to the point of being more ridiculous than a 1960s James Bond film. They actually tie a woman to a rocket, and the rocket has a bomb attached to it. The film is somehow hideously boring and massively over the top at the same time. In the cinema people were actually laughing at what I assume were supposed to be the more serious moments because of how stupid it was.
Belle get’s referred to as a stupid French person constantly, and the women are in the film for no reason other than to have their legs and pants shown off. The script and plot ideas seem to have been penned by a twelve year old while he was masturbating with his good hand and it feels worse than even some of the worst video game dialogue. It borderlines on being so bad it’s good and I would almost encourage you to go and see it entirely because of this.
I’m too uninspired to write anymore properly so here’s a list of other things wrong with the film.
- Thousands of bullets fired, no one gets injured.
- RZA pushes buttons ludicrously slowly so to give Damien time to shoot the receiver saving the day.
- RZA fixes the receiver because Damien only shot a wire in half, leaving everything else intact.
- RZA, despite having murdered people off camera a lot, is probably going to be the mayor at the end of the film, with full support by Damien and Lino.
- Loads of stuff, the film was absolutely atrocious.
Buy and watch it if you want, but if you do, you’re an idiot. Brick Mansions doesn’t even deserve a rating.
Dave Roberts
Brick Mansions at CeX
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