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 Meyers, 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)

A marketer’s dream, The
Omen is buoyed by (I guess that wouldn’t necessarily be “blessed with”) the novel
opening date of June 6, 2006 — numerical shorthand which steadfastly announces
its intentions to tap into the burgeoning tide of vaguely menacing religiosity
that’s fashionable in an anxiety-laden culture driven by the engines of terror,
war and natural disaster. A retelling of director Richard Donner’s 1976 chiller
about the spawn of the Devil, the horror flick is an earnest, decorous and
occasionally jolting rendering of the material, an entirely serviceable piece
of pop entertainment that will play best to those who haven’t seen or heard
much about the original.

The Manchurian Candidate) stars as
Robert Thorn, a young, well-heeled governmental attaché, and the godson of the
President of the United States.
After the stillborn death of their infant, Robert accepts another child without
telling his wife Kathryn (Julia Stiles), and they lovingly raise Damien (Seamus
Davey-Fitzpatrick) as their son, with Robert of course closely guarding this
aforementioned secret. It’s not long before Robert is elevated to the post of
Ambassador to Great Britain
when his boss dies in a freak accident.

Years later, Robert and Kathryn’s happy lives begin to take
a turn for the worse when Damien’s nanny hangs herself in front of a crowd at
his sixth birthday party. Father Brennan (Pete Postlethwaite), a mysterious but
traumatized priest, shows up and forecasts more horrible things for Kathryn,
Robert and others; Damien, he says, is the Antichrist, the human spawn of
Satan. Increasingly disconnected from and frightened by her son, Kathryn slips
into a depression. These events coincide with the Thorns’ hiring of a new
nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Mia Farrow), as well as the realization by photographer
Keith Jennings (David Thewlis) that distorted photos he’s taken may serve as
indicators of deaths both previous and impending.

As directed by John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines, The Flight
of the Phoenix) and updated by David Seltzer, the writer of the original
film, The Omen delivers a few
effective blows of menace, but ultimately leans too heavily on the theoretical
injection of viewers’ own beliefs and end-time apprehension to supply its
dread. This is evident in everything from the absurdly baroque touches that
stud threatening montages which are completely emotionally unconnected to the
narrative to a third act steeplechase that only bothers to sketch out the
barest details of a conspiracy that birthed Damien and brought him to Robert
and Kathryn’s care. In recreating two of the big five set pieces, retaining the
primeval nature of other deaths and fetishistically replicating its source
material’s meticulous production design, the movie most heartily evidences a
desire to be “all evil to all people.”

The original Omen
presented Damien as a sullen, neatly coiffed, little brunette kid — the
smallest member of the AC/DC dress-alike fan club — and this movie duplicates
that sedated character bit. Yet if, as the film suggests, all that we see here
is part of the Devil’s sly campaign of ascendancy — prologue to an apocalyptic
showdown on Earth — wouldn’t it be more chilling to contrast such murders and
death with a (somewhat more) charming countenance? The power of the Devil,
after all, lies in charismatic appeals to vanity, or at least an ability to lie
low and dormant (e.g., the phrase, “like a snake in the grass”) until proper
opportunity. Given the circumstances of mortal dispatch on display in The Omen, there’s no persuasive reason
to believe a sympathetic yet secretly malevolent figure could emerge. With a
remote stare, malevolent pout and about eight lines of dialogue in the entire
movie, Davey-Fitzpatrick’s Damien is a cipher for immoral wickedness — evil as
muted petulance.

Stylish yet mannered, The
Omen is a blank canvas that draws its anxiety from viewers’ own sense of
impending moral peril. A few good jolts are meted out, and if one allows their
mind to wander and indulge the narrative possibilities the story flirts with,
it’s certainly easy to muster some disconcertment. Mostly, though, the film’s
solemn creepiness is hermetically sealed off from its more direct, goosing
passages, proving that evil can be just as boring as saintliness. (20th Century Fox, R, 106 mins.)