Asian Fancy Martial Art Moves Before the Actual Fight Trope

You took some wrong directions, friend. This own't Monaco. It'south Baghdad!

— Gangster

District thirteen (French title Banlieue 13) is a 2004 French activeness moving-picture show directed by Pierre Morel and written by Luc Besson.

In the almost futurity, the worst ghettos (banlieues) of Paris are literally walled off. Banlieue thirteen, one of the worst of them, is run past the ruthless crime lord Taha. After Leito, the hero of the story, steals and destroys a shipment of Taha's drugs, Taha retaliates past kidnapping Leito'south sister Lola. Leito rescues her, simply is arrested by decadent cops, who surrender his sis to Taha and his gang. Leito murders the police captain in retaliation, and is imprisoned.

Half dozen months later, an undercover supercop named Damien is given an urgent mission: Taha has stolen a Neutron Bomb which has an automatic timer function engaged and set to detonate in less than 24 hours. Now with fourth dimension running out, Damien is ordered to befriend Leito as a guide into the ghetto, which has degraded to an outright war zone in the police'southward absence. Though unwilling to trust him, Leito agrees to assistance Damien find and cease the flop, but there's far more to this crisis than either of them know.

Features David Belle showcasing Le Parkour back earlier it was very well known in the English-speaking world. Dubbed into English as Commune 13 or District B13. A sequel, Banlieue 13: Ultimatum was released in 2009.

An English-language remake of this moving picture, Brick Mansions, was released in Northward America on April 25, 2014, and in its native French republic two days before. It one time again stars David Belle, this time sharing protagonist duties with Paul Walker in his last completed part before his death.

The offset motion-picture show provides examples of:

Anarcho-Tyranny: The French government has given up on trying to police the ghettos (banlieues) because of the massively surging criminal offence rates, allowing gangs to run them while leaving the citizens living at that place in the crossfire. Eventually, they conspire to wipe out everybody living there with a neutron bomb.
Atoning Attacker: Damien excuses himself at knocking Leito off his way to conciliate the bomb.
Creative License – Martial Arts: Leito makes a big deal virtually how Damien's technical fighting style is a sign of existence an surreptitious cop and not a street fighter like himself. However, in their climactic fight, Leito of all people scores not ane, only two very slick grappling moves (starting time a Victor roll in response to a boot grab and later a kani basami from the floor), something you lot don't usually larn in the 'hood. Given that Taha'due south mooks are shown watching Ultimate Fighting Championship, those things might exist in-universe the last fad in B13, which ways Leito was referring to subtler mannerisms instead of fancy martial arts stuff when he blew upwards Damien's cover.
Bad Boss: Taha kills his mooks on the merest whim and for whatsoever failure. This comes back to seize with teeth him when they decide to kill him for his tyrannical lunacy.
Batman Gambit: Minister of Defense Krueger refuses to pay Taha for recovering the flop, as he only wants Damien to introduce the code right there where the bomb is, not bringing it back. He probably believes a rascal like Taha volition be pragmatic plenty to leave the sale aside and just let Damien conciliate the bomb in gild to at least save his life. Yet, unfortunately for him, Taha isn't afraid of the bomb because he is planning to send information technology back to the city in a missile if the sale goes awry.
Boxed Cheat: Leito is first unknowingly recruited by the police and later allies himself with Damien for his own motives.

Car Cushion: One of the baddies lands on one in the first major chase scene.
Cloudcuckoolander: Taha. From frantically shooting a knowingly unloaded gun against a argue of aroused thugs to dice while pointing at them with his hands like guns immediately after.
Chained Heat: A variation. Damien pretends to be a crook to go far with Leito, who works it out directly away and leaves him handcuffed, nonetheless not to Leito, but to a steering wheel.
Charles Atlas Superpower: Yeti'due south bones are hard enough to break concrete with the fists and to survive to a block clock in the head, not to mention that he tin can take a John Woo-way flying dropkick in the abdomen without moving one inch off from his position. The movie is quite physically realistic until that point (all the stunts are real and done without wires or CGI), but this oddity is never explained. If anything, the but reason for his super-endurance appears to be only that he is fatty.
Concealment Equals Cover: Brilliantly averted. When facing a squad of armed mooks, Damien flips a table earlier them and takes cover behind, but he does it just to remove himself from their line of vision and move along as the bullets get through the woods as real life ammunition would.
Gainsay Parkour: Done by both Damien and Leito.
Combat Pragmatist: The jumping around and martial arts are pretty fancy to look at, but the heroes have no problem grabbing whatever's at hand to use equally a weapon.
Damsel in Distress: Lola, though just after the film shows her every bit a pretty capable gal herself.
Death Glare: Leito loves these, and especially notable is the one he throws to Government minister of Defense Kruger after learning he has no issues with killing all the B13 inhabitants.
Destination Defenestration: More than once from the galleries of the casino Damien clears out at the get-go of the film.
Didn't Think This Through:
- Leito brings Taha to the police station and fully expects the clearly corrupt police that has been neglecting Commune 13 for years to put him behind confined (with the boosted promise that a powerful kingpin like Taha doesn't happen to have connections with said corrupt law).
- Minister of Defense force Krueger's plan to wipe out the Commune 13 through the neutron bomb is just atrocious. Information technology leans fully on the points that the bomb is yet in the district and that Damien is able to reach it to introduce the code earlier the fourth dimension goes out, so if the flop goes anywhere other than District thirteen or Damien fails at discover it at that place in time, it all goes down (peradventure catastrophically so). The fact that he refuses to pay for the bomb is revealing: it makes articulate that he expected Taha to reasonably abandon the auction and just allow Damien introduce the code for gratis in order to salve his life, but it also shows he never even considered that Taha might Take a Third Option and just send the damn affair away from his district.
- He could too take executed his program much more than successfully if the detonation code of the bomb had been a random number and non a mix of suspicious digits (the code of the district, the exact date, etc). Admittedly, Leito would have probably deduced information technology anyways thanks to the rest of tracks, simply the code was even so a vital clue.

Dystopia: Banlieue 13 has turned into a crime-infested ghetto where the people live in fear of Taha and his gang, and the government has stopped trying to aid and taken its hands off them.
The Dog Bites Back: After the umpteenth fourth dimension Taha kills one of his mooks for failing him, they turn on him even when he can still pay them.
Earn Your Happy Ending: B13 isn't immediately restored to pristine conditions, but the final scene shows the beginnings of the rebuilding efforts.
Engineered Public Confession: Leito and Damien concoct one to take minister Kruger down after his failed plan.
Even Evil Has Standards: K2 never really hurts Lola (apart from manhandling her), and tells the other mooks to go out her lone. He as well looks distinctly uncomfortable with how Taha treats her. After he turns his dorsum and is visibly upset while the thugs finally gun downwards Taha.
"Facing the Bullets" Ane-Liner: Taha, to his own thugs:
Yous are all a bunch of useless dipshits.

Fighting Fingerprint: Leito is able to deduce Damien's identity as a cop later seeing him fight, noting that his style looks too formally trained for a supposed street scoundrel.

Forced Friendly Fire: Surreptitious detective Damien has to get out of a dangerous casino the hard way. So he pulls off an impressive example of the trope, shooting several mooks from multiple angles by locking upwardly a thug's arm in various ways. He besides shoots the thug through his leg. He then grabs another mook's arm and forces him to spray bullets around harmlessly before knocking him out.
Foreign Remake: Brick Mansions, again with David Belle as the Le Parkour-savvy cheat.
Gangsta Manner: Used past Damien twice in the casino fight scene. The commencement time when he shoots a thug while continuing on top of a slot machine and the second fourth dimension during the Gun Fu sequence while armlocking a thug.

Getting High on Their Own Supply: Taha is oftentimes seen snorting his own cocaine in his private quarters. This makes him fifty-fifty more unhinged than a tearing drug kingpin would already exist, to the signal where he'll oft murder his subordinates earlier going back to getting off on his own supply. This also proves his downfall, since it makes him too crazy for his minions to ultimately put up with when he tin can't pay them anymore.

Godwin's Law: Leito invokes this, and with some reason, though all it does is piss Damien off by comparing the government he works for with the Nazis (which is particularly offensive in France).
Damien: Y'all don't murder two million people because you tin can't solve their problems!
Leito: They murdered six one thousand thousand considering none of them were blonde with bluish optics!
Go-Go Enslavement: To spite Leito later on he almost got Taha arrested, Taha keeps Leito'southward sis Lola equally a chained-up slave and whipping toy in his quarters, forcing her to wear a hooker outfit and feeding her his drugs.
Government Conspiracy: The theft of the bomb was engineered by the government to wipe out the slums.

Gun Fu: Neatly showed by Damien when he guns downwardly several mooks past armlocking another henchman and making him fire his ain pistol against them. In the DVD extended edition, he takes another guy down with a flying armbar and repeats the method earlier shooting him the last from the hold.
Heroic BSoD: Damien has i when the timer on the bomb reaches goose egg just fails to detonate, revealing that Leito's proclamation of Godwin's Law was correct and the government minister did plan on killing anybody in Banlieue 13. The mix of shock for being all the same alive later what he believed it was inminent decease and for realizing that his superiors are really genocide wannabes after all reflects quite on his face.
Improvised Weapon: Several, but a detached steering wheel deserves a mention.

Karma Houdini: Leito is plain let off for killing the corrupt chief in the outset subsequently helping Damien in B13. Sure, the guy in question actually had it coming, just that was notwithstanding a government official he killed.
Impale the Poor: Turns out that the Minister's plan was to set off the neutron bomb inside of B13 all along.
Klingon Promotion: An unusually democratic example, when afterwards one too many impromptu executions and the loss of all his operating funds, the assembled mooks gun downwards Taha and immediately recognize K2 as their new leader.
Knuckle Cracking: A neck variation past Yeti.
Le Parkour: David Belle, one of the founders of parkour, plays the hero. He shows off his skills.
Fabricated of Iron: Damien gets punched around and even powerbombed over a pile of bricks. He looks adequately dazed and worn later, but null more. The fact he's still live afterwards those hits and the ones he receives in the climactic fight against Leito is notable by itself.
Magic Inaugural: The countdown on the bomb is set for 24 hours, but since it's non a series, it is shortened considerably. See also Heroic BSoD.
Mr. Fanservice: Damien and Leito are played past Cyril Raffaelli and David Belle respectively, 2 incredibly attractive, extremely athletic men who spend the film going elaborate parkour and martial arts fight scenes.
- Of the two, Damien seems to be a fleck of a Chick Magnet. The series just has 3 named female person grapheme, who of which hit on him and i of whom is his girlfriend.
- Leito, for his part, seems to detect the being of long-sleeved shirts offensive. He prefers to wear tanktops, a partially zipped hoodie, or nil at all. A style choice that serves to excellently show off David Belle's toned, tattooed body to perfection.

Neck Snap: Damien finishes a mook this way.
Neutron Bomb: The unrealistic Depopulation Bomb version ordinarily seen in media.
Oh, Crap!: Right in Damien'due south face up when his superior refuses negotiating with Taha and nonchalantly hangs upward the telephone to leave him to his fate. He has the Nerves of Steel to hide it and pretend he is beingness given confirmation, however.
Only in It for the Money: The only reason that Taha's mooks put up with his tyranny is because of the paycheck. Sure enough, equally soon as he loses all his money cheers to the heroes, they immediately plough on him.
Pet the Domestic dog: A small one by Damien when he turns downwardly K2's offering to give him Leito and freely leave with the bomb, which would have been the easiest manner for him to fulfill his mission. Subsequently an odyssey of barking at each other and getting himself almost screwed past Leito several times, Damien has come to intendance for him enough to protect the street fighter from falling on the thugs's hands if he tin can avoid it.
Ship Tease: Lola kisses Damien for the kicks at the cease of the moving-picture show.
Shoe Telephone: Supercop Damien shows pulls a mobile telephone from the sole of his sneaker in a small bit of Hammerspace. Information technology is less colorful than the classic examples, but enough to amuse Leito.
Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Pessimism: Instrumental to the motion-picture show. While both are pretty street-wise, Damien and Leito tilt to opposite sides in the scale: Damien is The Idealist and Leito is The Carper. At the end, Leito is correct.
Strapped to a Rocket: Taha makes sure to tie Leito's sister Lola (whom he had already kept as a catatonic slave for about a year) to the nuclear missile he stole before shooting it at the Paris urban center centre.
Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Both Leito and Damien conspicuously distrust each other from the kickoff, just they are smart enough to know that teaming up is the but manner to solve the thing. At the stop, they have become friends.
Tell Me How Y'all Fight: Leito deduces Damien is an undercover cop considering his martial arts and parkour fashion looks a bit too polished, every bit if learned in a dojo and not on the streets.
13 Is Unlucky: Of all the ghettoes of Paris, B13 is supposedly the worst.
Totalitarian Gangsterism: In the walled-off crime-ridden districts of Paris, the major gangs function as de facto feudal overlords, as the government has all just given up on trying to police the area. For case, they're perfectly capable of kidnapping the protagonist'south sister from her job as a supermarket clerk with nobody batting an eye.
20 Minutes into the Future: Man, the world is really fucked up in... 2010? ^notation The wall around District 13 was congenital in 2010, simply it's ambiguous how much fourth dimension has passed since so. But actually, that's about right.
Vigilante Man: Leito is in an 1-human state of war against the mafia.

Wrestler in All of United states of america:
- Damien knocks out a mook taking his back by doing rolling snapmare over a table.
- Afterward Yeti gives Damien a military press drib and a gunwrench powerbomb over bricks. Ouch.
- Also, in the DVD extended edition, Damien takes out a mook by doing a meteor genu drop over his back.
Yous Have Failed Me: Taha kills his mooks for their failures, repeatedly. Deconstructed when as soon every bit it'southward revealed that he'south lost most of his money, his mooks turn on him.

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/District13