Brick Mansions (2014)

"Brick Mansions" arrives as a remake of the 2004 French picture District 13, relocated from a Parisian banlieue to a walled-off stretch of dystopian Detroit. It was released five months after Paul Walker's death and dedicated to his memory. The film concerns a containment wall, a stolen nuclear device, and a great deal of parkour performed by men who appear to have spent their lives avoiding elevators. The critical consensus was unkind, and the audiences handed it a B+ anyway, which tells us something durable about the market for a man leaping between rooftops.

The ensemble is genuinely multiracial without announcing the fact. Walker, David Belle, RZA, Ayisha Issa and Catalina Denis share the frame in a majority-Black Detroit, and nobody pauses to congratulate the production for it. The villain's scheme is to level the projects so developers can raise upscale housing, which supplies a mild eat-the-rich flavor, though the film treats gentrification as a plot mechanic instead of a thesis. Race is never named. Tremaine's late pivot to a mayoral run on "equality and freedom" is played for a laugh, and the film seems content to leave it there.

Lola exists chiefly to be abducted, though she does briefly free herself before the plot recaptures her. No LGBTQ+ material appears. No climate allegory, no body-diversity messaging, no neurodivergent characters. The nuclear bomb is a ransom MacGuffin and nothing more. For a film with this much on its mind, it is remarkably reluctant to lecture. The mayor's recorded confession is the closest thing to a sermon, and it lasts seconds. A brawny, cartoonish action picture that mostly wants to be left alone to break bones and furniture.