Wonderful character development!

Sadly Over-hyped

Better Late Then Never

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

A group of multi-racial pals from France love nothing more than to Parkour it up on the local buildings and walkways. They've become so accomplished at what they do, they decide to open a gym in Bangkok to teach the local, underprivileged children how to Parkour. However, they unwittingly open their gym on the turf of the Japanese Yakuza, who are making inroads into Thailand. Henceforth, the ultimate confrontation begins to bubble up to the surface: who will win, the humble Parkour-ers or the nasty gangster baddies? Dare you find out? Here's what's good about The Great Challenge: there are a lot of extremely impressive physical feats, and the stuntwork and action scenes must have taken a lot of time and work to execute. We truly appreciate that. But here's the problem: there is no plot to speak of, and there is zero character development. So, yes, what these Parkour people do is quite extraordinary, but without decent storytelling, it's hard, if not downright impossible, to care about their plight. Consequently, you "check out" and you stop caring. So as much as we wanted to care about this band of buff ragamuffins (or ragabuffins, to use the vernacular), this movie made it really hard for us to get invested.We think we see what was going on here - make a PG-13-rated movie for the younger, Mountain Dew-drinking set that leverages the current trend of Parkour to get adolescent eyeballs on the screen. One of the main characters even strongly resembles Tony Hawk. While that may not have seemed like such a terrible plan, if The Great Challenge only had characterization, and was darker, grittier, and was rated R, we might have something. As it stands, it's "in one eye and out the other", a forgettable exercise that contains a lot of jumping and CGI sequences, but fails to deliver the serious-minded, bone-crunching blows that hardcore action fans have come to expect. The final brawl is a definite movie highlight, but it should have been that way from the jump (no pun intended). The movie shouldn't have saved its capital with the audience until the very end. By then it's too little too late.In the "mildly amusing" department, the little Thai street urchins have cast-off clothing from English-speaking countries that say "no fly zone", "crabby" and one has a colorful Street Fighter shirt. It's doubtful they know what their own clothing says. But the kids do get their own training sequence, so that's not out of keeping with classic action movies. But does it pay off? Plus, the baddies have these ridiculous bunched-up blankets on their heads that don't exactly inspire fear. The movie may be fast-paced, but where is it going? After seeing the same year's District B13 (2004), there's almost no need for The Great Challenge. So despite the hardworking stunt performances, we can't really recommend this.

I thought about suggesting that it might be a good idea to watch "Yamakasi 2 / The Great Challenge / Sons Of The Wind" with the sound off (it would at least eliminate the absurd French dubbing of every character in Bangkok, even local small children and Asian mobsters), but then you would not be able to listen to some pretty driving music....I'm not sure if the plot would make any less sense, though. For example, the final battle must have set some sort of record for "highest number of participants", but even our heroes seem confused as to whom they are fighting or why. If you forget about the plot and concentrate on the action, this movie does have some scenes that will have you going "Wow!", although sometimes the cutting is a bit too frantic. All the leads here (from the Luc Besson - discovered group Yamakasi) are obviously gifted athletes, and following Xin Xin Xiong's choreography, they come off as high-level martial artists as well. Special mention must be made of Elodie Yung, who is not only absolutely gorgeous and impressively fit, but a great fighter too. Her scorpion kicks rival those of Cynthia Rothrock! **1/2 out of 4.

Now, I may have had my expectations too high because the file read Les Fils du Vent, Yamakasi 2. I liked Yamakasi, even if I don't usually watch sport movies. As sports go, Free Running is pretty cool and the story and acrobatics of Yamakasi were very nice.This movie lacks the story, the technical prowess and it's set in Bangkok, where just about everyone knows how to jump from buildings (in the movie, of course). To make the French athletes fight in the end and mix Free Running with martial arts seemed to me a very bad idea.I could have liked this movie, though, if it weren't for the end. It's a mindless brawl where no one has any purpose in what they do. To make things worse, after this scene that seemed to be the end comes another, which practically voids the one before.So if you are a movie lover or a Free Runner enthusiast, you will not be particularly pleased with this movie. And it has no other qualities.

Some minor spoilers included. This movie looked very good when i first saw the trailer of it, but unfortunately after watching it i was very disappointed. Although the movie has been shot beautifully, the way it's been put together spoils the experience. I don't know if it was because of the subtitles, but it was next to impossible to discover a storyline in this movie. I found out what the story was by reading the DVD cover, but this shouldn't be necessary. It felt like the back story was all very well known to the producers of the movie, but they didn't put enough into bringing this forward in the movie itself. Because of this near lack of story you don't really connect to the characters and feel like watching some scenes instead of a coherent movie. The stunts and acting performed by the actors is good, but you'd be better off watching Yamakasi instead, in which there's more of a story and the stunts are similar. A missed opportunity.