A decade after the release of the parkour action flick District B13 seems like an odd time to revive the property for American audiences. Free-running was a brief and fleeting trend in the mid-aughts, best sustained today by shows like Ninja Warrior, but here is Brick Mansions anyway, trading the architectural apocalypse of Detroit for the slums of Paris and repurposing parkour luminary David Belle as Lino instead of Leito. Detroit as a go-to setting for urban squalor is equal parts heartbreaking and appropriate, and to its credit the film at least makes efforts to treat the run-down apartments as a den of culture rather than window dressing. However, in an action movie as haphazardly rendered as this one, any and all messages get lost after a while.

Brick Mansions ties together a Robocop-style web of corruption in Detroit in an indeterminate future where the most violent parts of the city (the title is a reference to the street name for the area) are walled off from the more affluent areas, guarded by the military and nigh unpenetrable. Inside, Tremaine (RZA) rules the streets with a mixture of New Jack City-esque goodwill and a gangland army sustained by his dalliances with the drug and arms trades. Outside, Damien (Paul Walker, in one of his final completed roles) looks to bring down Tremaine to protect the city and to avenge his father’s death at the hands of Tremaine’s private army. He ends up partnered with Lino (Belle), a hustler who lives between worlds but is drawn back into Tremaine’s web when his ex-girlfriend (Catalina Denis) is abducted. Oh, and Tremaine has a neutron bomb strapped to a rocket, to which Lino’s ex is tied at one point, that threatens at first to destroy Brick Mansions and later the entire downtown area of Detroit.

Mercifully, the film gets the basic contrivances out of the way early. Damien’s undercover journey into the heart of darkness is sniffed out by Lino, and before long they become a wisecracking pair of free-running death machines trying to foil Tremaine’s increasingly ridiculous plot for street domination. (The film’s handle on the logistics of what would happen upon the explosion of the bomb is full of holes from the start, holes that reach gaping status before film’s end.) This is when Brick Mansions fares the best, allowing Belle’s eye-popping prowess at jumping huge gaps and squeezing through impossibly small ones and Walker’s natural charisma to carry the film in a way that plays to its innate goofiness. The early attempts at gravitas ring so thoroughly false that Walker and RZA’s banter offers a pleasantly absurd reprieve after a while.

The anachronistic moments of comedy harken back to a different, older kind of action movie, one that screenwriter Luc Besson still heralds on high to this day. However, for all of Besson’s attributes as an action filmmaker with an eye for dark laughs, some of his nastier tendencies emerge before long. In particular, Besson’s long-running issue with female characters rears its head in pretty nasty fashion; Lino’s girlfriend is little more than a narrative prop who spends the first third or so of the film being called a bitch by pretty much everybody in the film. The film’s final message is also shaky, staging an argument for previously vile, murderous characters as the misunderstood protectors of the proletariat in a way that feels less insightful than unpleasant. And speaking of shaky, Camille Dellamarre’s direction wraps its arms around shaky-cam theatrics to such a point where more than a few of Belle and Walker’s best stunts are borderline incomprehensible. For a remake that wasn’t really essential to anybody, Brick Mansions could be worse, but it’s also an action movie destined for little more than tiebreaker rounds at pub trivia nights.