Jamie
Back in our salad days, Patrick and I fancied ourselves quite the film connoisseurs. We only watched the best (the best!). So of course we gathered up our friends to catch District B13 in theaters and people were pretty impressed. And rightfully so, we were rad… almost as rad as all the parkour we witnessed that day. By the time Brick Mansions came out we were even radder (can you believe it) and in the midst of building our vast BMT empire, but parkour wasn’t nearly as rad, so we let it pass on by, just biding our time until the moment was juuuuust right. That moment is now. Welcome to BMT Presents: The Brick Mansions Post: The Movie.
To recap, Brick Mansions is the story of Paul Walker, an undercover cop trying to live up to the memory of his father, a cop killed in the line of duty. He’s just trying to keep a dystopian Detroit from going down the toilet, but things are made hard by all the drugs and crime in the brick mansions. Oooo, all those drugs and crime. It just makes me so mad. It also makes Lino mad, a parkour madman who gets himself in trouble by trashing a bunch of heroin peddled by Tremaine. Turns out Tremaine owns (almost all) the cops, so even when Lino gets the upper hand it only lands him in jail and his girlfriend held captive by Tremaine. Just at that moment, Tremaine comes into possession of a nuclear weapon (word) and Walker’s gotta get that bad boy back, baby. He teams up with Lino and infiltrates the brick mansions and hold onto your butts, cause they’re gonna parkour… your butts off… that’s why you gotta hold onto your butts. Once all the butts have been parkoured off, Lino and Walker get to the nuclear weapon, but realize that something seems fishy. The code they are given to diffuse the bomb turns out to be the zip code for the brick mansions. Aha! Don’t you see?! It’s so dumb that it’s gotta be a trap! They parkour their way over to the mayor’s office who is like “but…uh… but…uh… what thuuuuu.” And Walker records him and he sounds so dumb that everyone votes him out of office and votes Tremaine in (for realz). We end with Walker all happy and the former drug dealer planting a tree with a jaunty hat on. Not joking. THE END.
Hoooo man. This movie is dummmmmmbbbbb. Like real stupid for real. I could say it doesn’t make any sense, but it does make sense. It’s just very stupid. But that’s OK, cause the parkour was great, right? Eh, not really. The whole venture seems held back by the fact that Walker is just not on the same level as David Belle (obviously) and so everything seems to be done with tricky camera work. Ultimately, it just came off as a bit lame. If you are going to watch the film I wouldn’t even watch it for the parkour. I would watch it for the hilarious dub they put on Belle, which makes him seem American (… maybe?), and the last fifteen minutes, which holds its own in the vast depths of stupidity we’ve subjected ourselves to in BMT. I mean, a drug dealer kidnaps an innocent lady and holds a city hostage with a nuclear weapon and then gets elected mayor! His second in command immediately starts planting trees and wearing fashionable hats! It’s ludicrous.
Hot Take Clam Bake! The bomb goes off. I’m not even sure this is a hot take. Let’s look at the evidence: They think that the bomb is a trick because the deactivation code is the zip code of the brick mansions. That’s stupid. It was the real deactivation code and the bomb exploded. Everything after that is what happens in Paul Walker’s mind the moments before his body disintegrates. He imagines solving his father’s murder, getting the elitist mayor out of office, turning around the city that he loves, and introducing a hardened drug dealer to environmentalism and fancy hats. That is not real. That is an imagined ending by a man who totally screwed up and let a nuclear bomb go off in a major city. Hot Take Temperature: Jammin’ Jalapeno. Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! Brick Mansions? More like Shit Mansions amirite? I mean, objectively it seems like the area of Brick Mansions is shit though. No hospitals or schools or anything? Seems like a terrible place to live. Let’s go!
- The code is just the zip code to Brick Mansions? “That seems suspicious Mr. Mayor, doesn’t it?” “Shut up Jonathan, it’s called ‘being poetic’, I want Paul Walker, this person I never met, to think for a split second that he just got got by super genius me after punching in this sweet code. I sure do hope the drug dealers don’t shoot him directly in the face immediately when he gets there, and also the ultra sweet parkour expert doesn’t help him. But again, I have to send the parkour guy back in instead of just killing him in prison because that is also poetic.” Because, for real, if fourteen different things don’t go right then the bomb just merely doesn’t explode in the middle of Brick Mansions. He’s relying on Paul Walker just being so sweet that he obviously finds and sets off the bomb.
- I guess from the top I should say: just watch District B13 if you want to see this movie. They are exactly the same movie, except instead of Paul Walker explaining why he isn’t doing sweet parkour everywhere, you get another parkour guy doing parkour. So by my calculations that makes it 2x as rad as this film already.
- Paul Walker is a terrible actor. Sorry.
- Why did they dub the French guy with a bad American accent? They already try and claim he is Quebecois. So … why do they then go out of their way to give him a not-French accent? Just make him speak French or let him speak with an accent or dub him over with someone with a clear accent.
- In the end are we supposed to be rooting for the murderous drug dealers who wanted to blow up a bomb in the middle of Detroit to become mayor? So we have back-to-back mayors of Detroit who wanted to set off a bomb in the middle of Detroit? What a wild timeline.
- Parkour has never looked so bad. Sorry.
- I’m going to throw out the assistant drug dealer as a potential Planchet (Who?) even though I don’t think he gets made fun of enough, I think he’s some other trope, like Incompetant Number Two or something. Some minor Product Placement (What?) for things like BMW. An excellent Setting as a Character (Where?) for Detroit Rock City. A very good MacGuffin (Why?) for the bomb that is in desperate need of disarming. And a Worst Twist (How?) candidate for the reveal that the bomb would only go off once the code was punched in (not the opposite). Definitely a BMT film.
There was already an original Brick Mansions, and a sequel to that … doesn’t mean I can’t make my own sequel Brick Mansions 2: Sins of the Father. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 