| Anybody who has seen the new James Bond film Casino Royale (2006) will remember the heart-pounding foot race in the film’s exciting first half, as Bond (Daniel Craig) chases a bombmaker through a building construction zone. It’s a breathtaking scene, with both characters scrambling up walls, hurdling obstacles and taking death-defying leaps off buildings, all done without CGI or wirework.
The scene is a memorable demonstration of the discipline of parkour, in which talented athletes race through urban centres, zipping over and through major obstacles as though they weren’t there. Bond’s enemy in this scene is played by Sebastien Foucan, one of the world’s foremost practitioners of both parkour and the similar discipline of freerunning. The guy makes this stuff look easy. The main difference between the two disciplines is that parkour focuses on speed and efficiency, while freerunning allows for flashy stunts and tricks, such as somersaults and backflips. Both styles are thrilling to watch, with the more efficient parkour style particularly well-suited to exciting chase scenes in action films.
Want to see this stuff in action? Well chances are, you have already. Parkour and freerunning have been featured in recent TV ads for cars, running shoes, and cell phones. If you’ve seen the ads, you know the ones I’m talking about.
Foot chases have long been a staple in action films. The central image of a protagonist running for his of her life is unforgettable in such films as Marathon Man (1976), The Fugitive (1993) and Run, Lola, Run (1998). Sure, car chases can be pretty cool, but they’ve had their day, and that day was the 1970s. Nowadays, parkour is bringing back the humble foot chase in a big way. Two films in particular deserve your attention for their extraordinary parkour-influenced chase scenes:
· Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (2003) – Tony Jaa brings astonishing stuntwork and kickboxing skills to this, his first starring role. The plot is so thin that it’s practically translucent – Tony must enter a kickboxing tournament in order to retrieve a stolen statue that is sacred to the people of his village. During his quest he encounters all manner of lowlifes and his agility and fighting ability are both put to the test. Tony’s knee-kicks and elbow strikes are impressive, but the most indelible image of the entire film is a foot chase that occurs about half an hour in. Pursued by dozens of thugs, Tony zips through a tumbledown market district, where all manner of obstacles conspire to block his way. Cars, bicycles, rakes, tables, hot woks full of tempura, panes of glass – all of these suddenly appear in Tony’s path, and none of them slow him down for an instant. One second he’ll leap through a tight coil of barbed wire, the next he’ll do the splits as he dives underneath a moving minivan. All of this takes place at street level, so there isn’t much of the roof-diving we’ve come to expect from parkour, but that hardly matters in a scene this frantic and inventive. A real crowd-pleaser.
· District 13, a.k.a. Banlieue 13, a.k.a. District B13 (2004) –This French action thriller begins with a chase scene of stunning virtuosity. We see heroic slum-dweller Leito (played by David Belle, the guy who invented parkour) destroying several kilos of heroin just as the mob comes looking for it. In the scene that follows, we see the shirtless, tattooed Leito running for his life from a dozen well-armed gangsters. Well, perhaps "running" isn’t the word – this guy has got to be one of the most nimble people on the planet. He’s more like a gust of wind than a man. After snaking his way through several rooms, corridors and stairwells of the decrepit office building, he takes to the rooftops where some truly breathtaking parkour leaps come into play. The bad guys are agile too, and a surprising number of them keep up the chase, plunging off rooftops, trotting along ledges and hurdling spiky handrails. No special effects, no stuntmen – it’s clearly Belle doing those amazing acrobatic manoeuvres. It’s the perfect chase scene – we instantly know who the good guy is, who the bad guys are and what’s at stake.
You’d be forgiven for assuming that the opening chase will be the highlight of the movie, but District 13 surprises by keeping up this breakneck pace throughout most of the film’s running time, as Leito is joined by an equally agile undercover cop (Cyril Raffaelli), and the two of them try to prevent a neutron bomb from going off in the middle of the city. The flick is about 40 minutes of plot and 40 minutes of action, which is a darn good ratio. Action fans who don’t mind subtitles are in for a real treat. |
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