Car chases, fighting, and lots of parkour

District 13: Ultimatum, a hopped-up, hammy sequel to the 2004 urban French action romp, is, like its predecessor, rife with parkour stunts - parkour being a daunting discipline that involves running, jumping, rolling, leaping, sliding, and sidling over, around, and along various large obstacles and altitudinous edifices. Roof-hopping, check. Banister-leaping, mais, oui.

The film, scripted by this week's omnipresent Luc Besson (see From Paris With Love), is also, in its ubiquitous Gallic way, a throwback to '70s blaxploitation fare: The world of District 13 (or Banlieue 13 in its original) is a near-future nightmare of social unrest where the nonwhite minorities - the French Africans, the Arabs, the Asians - have been relegated to towering concrete apartment complexes on the fringes of the city. The police patrol warily and heavily armed, and although nobody actually says "the Man," it is the Man - in the guise of the government, the cops, and military - that is sticking it to this colorful, clamorous community.

Cyril Raffaelli and David Belle are back as, respectively, the tough undercover police-dude Damien Tomaso and his tattooed, renegade pal, Leito. There's some seriously fascistic conspiring going on in the upper echelons of the government (the French president is out of the loop, played earnest but ineffectual by Philippe Torreton), and Damien - who needs to be gotten out of the way - has been set up on a phony drug rap and thrown in jail. Big mistake.

With a thumping score and whirling cinematography, District 13: Ultimatum delivers two or three awesomely choreographed chase-and-fight-and-chase-and-fight-again sequences. The dialogue (in French, with subtitles) is not this movie's strength, nor should it be.

But caroming around bustling marketplaces and drug dens, diving off balconies, and driving stolen police cars through office windows most certainly is.EndText