After several features, French filmmaker Luc Besson really burst onto the international scene in 1988 with The Big Blue, and further made an impression with 1990’s La Femme Nikita and 1994’s The Professional, which jointly helped inspire many a Quentin Tarantino bloodbath, as well as all manner of low-grade American independent scene rip-offs. In the ensuing years, though, apart from the colorful The Fifth Element and the Joan of Arc biopic The Messenger, Besson has turned into a veritable entertainment impresario, writing, co-writing and/or producing more than two dozen features in the last six years, including Kiss of the Dragon, Wasabi, two Transporter flicks, Unleashed and several iterations of the same-named French series that spawned the American abomination Taxi, starring Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah. His latest: District B13.

Set in a gritty, crime-riddled Paris less than a decade into the future, the film draws its title from a walled ghetto where crime lord Taha (co-writer Bibi Naceri) rules without mercy. Early in the picture, whirling dervish Leito (David Belle) loses his sister to Taha — who literally keeps her as a dog, strung out on drugs and on a leash — and is imprisoned as an enemy of the state. When a high-grade weapon goes missing in the titular district, however, undercover elite task force policeman Damien (Cyril Raffaelli, a Gaelic Seth Myers, if he were an action hero) draws the time-sensitive assignment of breaking into the fortified borough and disarming it. Since Leito knows every nook and cranny of the area, and additionally has a score to settle with Taha, Damien springs him from jail and makes him a proposition: find and stop the bomb with him, and then they’ll rescue his sister.

In keeping with the overriding ethos of many of these films in which Besson has served as creative facilitator, Magnolia Pictures’ District B13 (expanding throughout June) is — how do you say this? — not a movie of murky or clandestine motivations. Its story is straightforward, save a single, socially conscious twist that anyone familiar with any of Besson’s work will see coming, if perhaps embrace no less heartily. A fan of expertly crafted, populist lowbrow, Besson keeps things ludicrously simple (genre haters would substitute the word “dumb”), working with a cool, precise shorthand that assures one never focuses for too long on the roughhewn plot seams of the movie. Director Pierre Morel, meanwhile, shoots a kinetic frame, and indulges the leonine muscularity of his two stars. Each possess a lithe, gymnastic ability — including one madcap sequence where Leito and Damien each go Qbert on a split-level apartment building — that is refreshing in a genre of overly brawny action set pieces.

The reason? District B13 centers its action around the discipline of parkour, which embraces the art of continuous movement. Eschewing brute force in favor of physical agility and quick, improvisatory thinking, this tack of balletic action dovetails perfectly with the movie’s economy of means. Cinematographer Manuel Teran’s caffeinated work sometimes gets a bit ahead of itself, but in involving the actors in their own choreography and leaning heavily upon their natural charisma, Morrel and Besson craft a movie that takes advantage of many of its restrictions.

As Hollywood cycles through outrageous concepts and struggles to top itself with more and more radical and clamorous set pieces, it takes a streamlined, unrepentant piece of genre fare like District B13 — fast, furious and en français — to remind those who most enjoy these types of cathartic movies that there’s a certain joy to be found in simply working with the basest elements. Luc Besson, in all his mad scientist, chop shop glory, gets that. (Magnolia, R, 84 minutes)