It’s 2018, and Detroit is under martial law, the neighborhood of Brick Mansions is sealed behind checkpoints and security walls, and the mayor and his cronies have cooked up a shady redevelopment scheme.

That's a summary of "Brick Mansions," the movie, as provided by A.O. Scott, the lead film critic of the New York Times. The latest pop culture take on the dystopian side of Detroit and a film brimming with frenetic, French-style parkour action, opens nationwide today, and has received mixed reviews from critics. 

Scott writes the film is "brawny, dumb and preposterous," but adds: "it nonetheless comes tantalizingly close to being a high-impact allegory of race, class and real estate in a postindustrial, new-Gilded Age America."

"Brick Mansions" bites off more plot than it can comfortably chew, Scott continues, "making a crucial final twist more ridiculous than revelatory. But narrative coherence is irrelevant here." Director Camille Delamarre "is not an action virtuoso, but his visual style, heavily indebted to the Grand Theft Auto video games, is appropriately rough and kinetic." 

Adam Graham writes in the Detroit News:

Outside of local chuckles — a preview audience erupted in laughter when the city’s mayor lamented, “the city’s damn near broke!” — there isn’t much to grab onto in “Brick Mansions.” It was filmed in Montreal (with some exterior shots of Detroit tossed in), but feels like it was cobbled together from outtakes from “Rumble in the Bronx.”

"High on stuntwork and low on logic," said Rafer Guzman in Newsday.

"The action may be serious, but "Brick Mansions" doesn't take itself too seriously," writes Christy Lemire at RogerEbert.com. It's a ridiculous movie that has the decency to acknowledge that it's ridiculous."

The Rotten Tomatoes website gives "Brick Mansions" a paltry 34 percent score on the Tomatometer, indicating most critics who weighed in on the film disliked it.

This is Rotten Tomatoes' summary:

Choppily edited and largely bereft of plot, Brick Mansions wastes a likable cast on a pointless remake of the far more entertaining "District B13," which was set in Paris and, like "Brick Mansions," highlights the French martial arts/physcial discipline known as parkour.

Notable:

"Brick Mansions" stars Paul Walker, who plays an undercover cop. The anchor of the “Fast and Furious” franchise, who died in a car accident in November, demonstrates why he will be missed, Scott writes in the Times. He brought quiet charisma to noisy movies and seemed to know instinctively just how seriously to take what he was doing.