This is a French
action picture with an insignificant
story line. Its attraction
is the
stunts performed by the main characters, most of whom are French
Arabs. Two of the most memorable stunts are a scene near the beginning
where the main characters all
scale the outside of a high rise building at
dawn, and one in the middle where two of them have an encounter with some
angry
guard-dogs in the bilevel
foyer of a
mansion. I think the dog-scene
was the best in the movie.
Basically the whole movie is a series of stunts, without gore. The story
is simple and embarrassingly shallow. But that's the Jackie Chan model for
action pictures, and I fully approve of it. It consists of two elements:
(1) throw out the actors and let the stuntmen commandeer the picture, and
(2) don't let the story-line distract the audience from the stunts.
Yamakasi toes this line well, and I enjoyed it. (I only wish Jackie Chan
would stop trying to be an actor and go back to his old style, where
arbitrary props suddenly come indispensibly to hand and mindless slapstick
turns to Chaplinesque choreography.)
Yamakasi is in French. I saw it in Taiwan, where it had English and
Chinese subtitles.