Yamakasi (2001)
Director: Ariel Zeitoun, Julien Seri
Written by: Luc Besson, Philippe Lyon, Julien Seri, Charles Perrière
7 guys from Paris’ suburbs like challenges like climbing tall buildings and doing parkour – especially with cops/flics chasing them. When a kid fan urgently needs a heart the Yamakasis try to find a way.
Let’s make this quick because it won’t be painless.
Yamakasi is both the name of the film and the name of the group of French atheletes who introduced the world to the art of parkour. This film features all of the groups members who excel at having zero charisma, meaning you should not expect more illustrious members David Belle (District B:13) and Sebastien Foucan (Casino Royale and an underappreciated deathmatch movie I love, The Tournament). No, this is the leftovers.
It may be that the leftovers, despite a lack in on-screen presence, are just as adept and impressively skilled as the Belle and Foucan (who had already left the Yamakasi group over internal disputes before the Yamakasi movie was filmed). It may be, but Seri and Zeitoun are determined to mask the athleticism with shoddy editing. My notes are littered with rage over this. Every jump is cut before the subsequent landing. Every. Single. One. They often don’t match seamlessly either — so if you are imagining the effect as seeing the jump from one angle and switching to another angle for the landing of the same jump, well, no, think again. They look strongly like two separate events filmed at two separate times. There is a jump. There is a landing. Through the century-old magic of film-making, they become the same event.
But the stunt is ruined. You will garner no sense of any actual parkour going on in this movie, even though there probably was. Probably. Maybe. Who knows? It’s all been left on the cutting room floor, butchered in the editing room. How the performers themselves could stomach it (and film a sequel in 2004!) is beyond me. If it was my work, my risks, my ART being sliced apart into a crude parody I would be FURIOUS.
Yamakasi NEEDED the spirit of a skate video interlayed into its frankly stupid Robin Hood plot to steal from rich, greedy doctors to pay for a poor kid’s heart transplant. Skate videos not only show their stunts in long or medium shot in an unbroken take so you can be IMPRESSED by the skill, but they contain a raw, unfiltered energy that would suit these men and the art of parkour. Yamakasi sounds, to English speakers, like a Japanese word but to the French translates roughly as “high energy.” What better way to incorporate that stance with footage that coincides?
The whole movie lacks energy. There’s no impetus to the plot, no life in the stunts. Nothing but badly cut jumps to landings and a desperate attempt to make these guys honorable rogues. It’s miserable.
What’s just as miserable is the clown music that plays over their hopping and leaping. The movie thankfully stops short of non-diagetic cartoon sound effects, but I’m sure these effects were considered. It is humdrum, boring, dead. A repeated drum machine beat plays over large segments of the film. Chillout music plays when something exciting is called for. Again, Seri and Zeitoun come off as deliberately destroying what Yamakasi stand for and what they’re trying to accomplish with their film.
And again…these guys did a sequel together (minus Zeitoun, who knows why…and who knows why THIS needed two directors???) so I guess they’re all hacks through and through and oblivious to how badly they misrepresent themselves.
This film dares to references its betters, such as Magnificent Seven and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. Good on Belle and Foucan for not being part of this deadweight atrocity.
These screengrabs look like crap because the entire movie looked like crap. I did my best.
I’m having trouble tracking down Dante Lam’s Option Zero from 1997 for my next entry. If anyone can help me track it down, I’d appreciate that. So for now I’m skipping it over.
Next Time: Peking Opera Blues
An Explorer, Not an Expert 