Tracers (2015)

Parkour is an element of films that has grown to prominence in the past fifteen years thanks to movies like District B13, the remake Brick Mansions, and Casino Royale.  It involves people jumping over, under, and around things.  People climb, they run, they jump, and they fall.  It’s basically a martial art based on running away in the most impressive way possible.  It can look really good on film.  That doesn’t mean that using parkour as a crux of the film’s story is always a good idea.

Another movie that attempted to use parkour for entertainment purposes was 2015’s Tracers.  The title is explained in the movie as people who practice parkour.  Tracers is about Cam (Taylor Lautner), an out of money bike messenger who gets involved in a criminal parkour ring.  He was lured in by his love for Nikki (Marie Avgeropoulos) and now must report to her lover Miller (Adam Rayner).  Cam uses his new found criminal job to try and pay off a large amount of debt that he has accumulated.

One thing that made Tracers stand out to me was how well cast the lead role was.  I’m not one to go into a movie expecting Taylor Lautner to be great.  The movies I’ve seen him in show the opposite of great acting.  He’s one of the weakest parts in the Twilight franchise, which is saying something considering how maligned the movies are and how I remember very little of them from when I saw them two years ago.  (I know it was two years ago because I wrote a Twilight review for the Sunday “Bad” Movies and scrapped it last minute.)  Then came his follow-up to the franchise, an action movie called Abduction.  The movie was a big budget action movie centered about him.  Lautner didn’t have the gravitas to make the action entertaining, and instead felt as flat as a Subway flatbread sandwich.  I can’t say my hopes were up for his performance in Tracers, but the movie managed to actually highlight the right qualities of the actor.  It felt like he actually came through in his performance, and the action worked in spades.

Perhaps the action worked because it was mostly practical parkour.  Lautner has never been a person to shy away from the fact that he can do some martial arts type stuff.  His transition into Tracers was fairly seamless, since parkour really is an offshoot of martial arts.  Instead of fighting, it is about dodging obstacles.  Using parkour as the primary source of action allowed Lautner to showcase his abilities and gave him the ability to perform better than in other movies that used explosions and CGI as their action sources.  He works much better as an actor when he is involved in the action as opposed to watching non-existent action happening around him.

Yet there was more to his performance that had improved since the last few times I had seen him.  In Tracers, Lautner was able to fill the character rather than be the hollow shell of a person like he was in Abduction.  He managed to feel like a real person, and you could relate to him as a viewer.  It was an interesting thing to see come out of an actor who had basically been a shallow love interest in the Twilight films and an empty vessel for action in Abduction.  He was given material that allowed him to act and it gave him a way to show that he was more than a pretty face.  I would be interested to see him in more things like this in the future.

Turning away from the acting, let me take a quick look at the action.  For the most part, the action throughout Tracers was practical.  I can’t really think of a part of the action that wasn’t practical in the movie.  All of the parkour was practical, with people jumping gaps, running up bucket trucks, and falling off of buildings.  All of that seemed to be done with stunt people or the actual actors.  It makes the danger of parkour as a pastime or an escape plan feel more visceral.  Anything could go wrong and if it does, there will be real physical damage that comes with it.  It was an interesting change of pace for a cinema landscape in which there is such heavy reliance on CGI to make action sequences safer for performers, as well as to make the action bigger.  The low-key practical action of the movie worked.

Tracers runs into a problem in the story area, however.  There are a few twists and turns throughout the movie that don’t make a whole lot of sense or are just plain dumb.  The reveal about why the team is together felt needlessly convoluted, and the ending tied up a little too neatly.  A stronger story could have helped the movie to become much better and be more appreciated by the people who watched it.  Instead, it is given a story reminiscent of the video-on-demand, direct-to-video movies that it is one of.  It never reaches above that level of storytelling, which leaves the movie at okay without attempting to be outstanding.

The other major problem with Tracers was the cinematography.  There was a mixture of different camera types including GoPro or some other point-of-view camera amongst the more standard cameras.  The intercutting of each different camera type didn’t necessarily work to better the film.  In fact, it looked like garbage for the most part.  I never really got used to it.  The look of the movie bothered me from beginning to end.  Though I enjoyed the action in the back half of the movie, some of the effect was tarnished by the overall gritty look of the movie with the different camera work.

If you want a decent parkour movie with some decent action and decent performances, Tracers is a movie to seek out.  It might not look the best, but it is still a semi-entertaining movie.  I would be lying if I said that parkour has never been done better.  It has.  However, I would also be lying if I said that this movie didn’t make the parkour entertaining at some points.  That is a feat within itself.  I’m glad to have watched the movie because I didn’t realize I would enjoy it as much as I did.  I hope to find some other people who also enjoyed it.

I hope you enjoy these notes as well:

• Tracers was suggested to me by @TheChewDefense.
• There was an actor named Sam Medina in Tracers.  He has already been featured in a Sunday “Bad” Movie.  That movie was Freelancers.
• Have you seen Tracers?  Did you like it?  Do you like when parkour is used in movies?  Do you like practical action?  You can answer any of these questions in the comments section.
• The comments section can also be used to suggest movies for future Sunday “Bad” Movies installments.  If you don’t want to suggest in the comments, you could also suggest movies to me on my Twitter or at my email: sundaybadmovies@gmail.com.
• Next week’s movie is Nightmare Asylum, an early 90s shot-on-video horror flick.  I watched it last night and it is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.  So you have that to look forward to for next week.  I’ll see you on the flip side.