Ooh, off the heel. Not good.
You would get made fun of so bad in parkour
if you were doing that.
My name is Lorena Abreu,
and I am a professional parkour athlete and stuntwoman.
I started parkour in 2013,
then got to do some parkour for Cirque du Soleil.
Today, we're going to be looking at parkour stunts
for film and TV and judge how real they are.
I love this scene,
because it's shot kind of like a parkour video.
You know, mostly wide.
I like just being able to see the parkour clearly.
So, technique-wise, the underbar, excellent.
You go feetfirst, you catch with your arms,
and you pull the bar through you, like this.
I don't really see them doing anything for no reason,
which tends to happen a lot
in other films that have parkour chase scenes.
It looks like the two ninja space guys
are only doing kong vaults in this scene.
A kong is a vault where you use both hands
to push down on the wall that you're vaulting over,
and your feet come through the center.
In real life, if these guys were actually running
for their absolute lives,
I think some of those kong vaults
would've been safeties instead.
A safety vault is when you put one hand down on the obstacle
and one foot down on the obstacle.
The other foot comes through the middle.
So, the reason that one is the most efficient
is because you can actually push off that foot
that's planted on the wall and get speed.
Fennec is actually doing mostly safety vaults
and speed vaults.
A speed vault is a safety vault,
but without putting your foot down.
Vertical pole swings are one of my favorite things ever.
Their technique for the vertical pole swing was great.
They led with their arms
and swung their legs behind them and around
to redirect their momentum.
I would not recommend swan-diving
off of a building chest-first
unless you were competing in a belly-flop competition
and landing in a pool, on some water.
So, what I would do instead is do a turn vault
and climb down.
For me, it's a 10 out of 10.
It is 100% legit parkour,
unless you include the swan dive.
[grunting]
Parkour!
This scene from "The Office"
is the bane of so many parkour athletes' existence,
but I love it!
This is parkour.
Internet sensation of 2004.
And it was in one of the Bond films.
It's pretty impressive.
The goal is to get from point A to point B
as creatively as possible.
The clips he showed on the laptop were legit.
Their guy was doing tic tacs and 180 wall runs
and, you know, one of those old-school 2004 wall flips.
I think this was great exposure for parkour,
because Jim's definition was legit
and put the word "parkour" in a lot of people's vocabulary.
And, yeah, the downsides is that
a lot of people didn't take it seriously.
Nobody likes getting yelled, "hardcore parkour!"
in the streets while we're training.
It happens all the time.
We go one at a time.
Here it is, here it is.
Truck to refrigerators to dumpster,
360 spin onto the pallets.
That's actually probably the most realistic portrayal
of planning a parkour line
that I've seen in film or television.
We call sequences of movements
that we usually film and post on YouTube or on Instagram,
a run. We're standing around,
we see something that we want to do,
"Oh, I can do this from here to there."
"OK, now how do I connect it all?"
Backflip gainer into the trash can.
Dwight: Yeah, gainer! Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah!
A gainer is a backflip that travels forwards.
The level of talent has increased
so dramatically in recent years
that I actually think there are now multiple people
that could probably do a running gainer
off of that wooden platform into the recycling bin.
But, yeah, that's just not really a thing.
I want to rate it 10 out of 10
for how much I enjoyed it.
In terms of parkour realism,
I don't know, a 2.
Doing a descent like that,
going straight from arms
to catching only with your arms again,
you would rip your shoulders out of their sockets
unless you were unbelievably strong.
They could have made this scene
10,000 times more realistic
by doing the actual descent technique
of having her hit her feet first
before landing on the lower walls
with her hands in a cat position.
The technique was super legit in her takeoff.
The pressure she's doing up on the window, that's legit.
You can definitely stay there in that position.
Her little prep ops to the side
before jumping this way, all of that was legit.
The only thing that was not legit with that move
was the distance.
You know how hard it is to jump that far
without coming off of the wall?
So, she has to jump that hard
and somehow stay skating on the surface of the wall
to go that far over there.
Uh, no.
I rate this scene from "Alice in Borderland"
a 2.
This is, like, almost parkour, but it's not.
That little cat leap that Sébastien just did
and his run up the beam, 100% authentic.
A cat leap in parkour
is when you jump to the face of a wall,
so you're either hanging onto the top of the wall,
which is the most common,
or you're grabbing onto the sides
and crimping it, like Sébastien just did.
Sébastien Foucan is one of the founders of parkour.
He can probably do it even faster.
And just like anything else in parkour,
you always want to go feetfirst,
because feet forwards is the rule.
It's the law, and you can never break it.
Unless you're doing a dive kong or a dive roll.
You never want to go hands-first,
'cause that's how you hit your head.
There are plenty of guys that can do that no problem
and much higher and on things much skinnier.
I'd imagine that Craig or his stunt double
had wires running up that crane, just for safety.
The run-up for the jump was excellent.
So, the most important factor
that goes into doing a jump like this,
or any jump, is your run-up,
your last three steps, and your foot placement.
That is the parkour bible.
More experienced athlete will know to map out
their last three steps way ahead of time.
I don't think Craig took stutter steps,
which, maybe he should have.
It's really, really easy to mix up your steps
when you're going into a running jump in parkour.
You can see the difference in parkour technique
between Sébastien and Craig.
Sébastien's character has a more tight,
compact air form in the middle of his jumps,
whereas Craig's body is more extended
and a little bit less in control.
So, in parkour,
that's why you're going to see us tuck into a ball.
We're bringing our knees to our chest
and extending our feet forwards
to position your feet correctly for the landing.
So, it makes sense that Daniel Craig's character
would not know to do that.
That was a massive drop.
In real life, the reason why
someone like Mr. Bond here
would've missed his feet the way he did
would be because he didn't get his feet
properly in front of him.
So, when you do a drop precision,
you generally don't tuck into a ball in the air.
You always want to be aiming your feet
at what you're landing on.
So, he undershot it.
His chest was too far forward.
You always want to keep your chest neutral.
So, Sébastien's character just did a classic,
beautiful parkour roll.
You can take some gnarly height drops
if you can roll correctly.
We generally go hands-first, at an angle,
so you don't get too much impact
in any one part of your body.
And that's exactly what Sébastien just did.
When Bond took this height drop,
I don't know if this had to do with
the weird little, whichaw! split-leg thing
that he did at the takeoff for no reason.
But he actually did a perfectly fine roll when he landed.
It just appears in the shot
that he had too much momentum
that sent him flying off.
That's realistic. That can definitely happen.
Based on realism,
I would have to give it a 9 out of 10.
The techniques and the physics of everything
was all fantastic.
Ooh, off the heel. Not good.
You would get made fun of so bad in parkour
if you were doing that.
Anytime you're doing anything in parkour,
especially a stride,
which is a jump off of one leg,
and especially if it's off something skinny,
you want to perform the movement
off the ball of your foot,
for safety and power and efficiency.
His arm movements are legit.
Whenever you're jumping at something,
you want to send your arms
in the direction of what you're jumping at.
If you're doing a stride, you'll often do
opposite arms to legs.
That's legit.
You can definitely do that.
If you're doing a massive jump,
you don't really want to land
in a stride on just one leg.
It's a lot of impact for no reason.
I would rate it, like, an 8 out of 10,
because he's doing real parkour,
just with bad technique.
I love how he's just randomly doing parkour
in random places.
Parkour generally consists of jumping from things
to other things and not just off of things.
So, the spots where we'd actually train
to practice parkour is walls
that are more or less near other walls.
But we can also practice on grass,
to practice tricks, to practice falling,
which is extremely important, falling safely.
In terms of the skills
that he's practicing in this montage,
that is 100% realistic and expected of someone
who is just starting to do parkour.
So, when you first learn parkour,
you are going to learn the jumps.
He did a little running jump stride off of the end of that.
Didn't land with great technique,
but it's fine 'cause he's a beginner.
You're going to learn the vaults.
That was a lazy vault over the car.
It's all legit parkour.
The sketchiness of doing a full-speed running jump
from one level of a parking garage
down to another level of a parking garage
when you're a beginner is just, no.
No a todo.
He had, like, no run-up.
He took, what, like, five steps into that giant gap?
And not even trying to sell the landing.
Like, they literally just cut to him being on another floor.
Without the last scene,
I would rate this a 9 out of 10 for realism.
Big props to Taylor Lautner.
I don't know if they actually scaled that entire building,
but there's no reason to believe they wouldn't,
because the Yamakasi absolutely did things like that.
So, the Yamakasi are the quintessential parkour team
that invented what became parkour
as we know it today.
I can't see much detailing in those shoes.
I don't know if that was an advertisement.
You can technically do parkour in any shoes,
and you can do it barefoot too.
You should train barefoot, actually,
frequently, to refine your technique
and strengthen all the muscles in your feet.
So, these shoes that I'm wearing,
the version with laces is actually really good.
That is an ideal midsole
that will protect you from most impact.
Things like these flips,
if we're talking parkour, they're not efficient,
but they're obviously fun,
and they're stylish.
We tend to use the term freerunning
to describe anything that's nonefficient
that's generally used for style,
whereas we use parkour to describe
efficient and power movements.
So, I like to look at it like a spectrum,
with parkour on one end and freerunning on the other.
I, for example, land somewhere over here.
Like, I can do some flips,
but I am mostly out jumping at stuff.
So, it looks like they were using their legs a lot
in scaling that building.
When it comes to scaling things
and when it comes to doing parkour in general,
you want to use your legs as much as possible,
because they are the strongest muscles in your body
and the ones that take the longest to exhaust.
When they were going up on those concrete things,
you could see that their arms were mostly lax
and they were pushing with their legs to come up on it.
Taking height drops, those early speed vaults
with the arm up here, super Yamakasi style.
You can see the Yamakasi
all kind of doing their own thing.
Everyone's doing something similar but slightly different.
So, in real life,
what would determine which moves you would choose
depends on a number of factors.
One, what do you want to do?
Because we're generally doing parkour for fun.
Two, your height could play a role in it.
A jump might be huge for you if you're my size,
but it might be small for you if you're someone else.
I would have to give it at least a 12 out of 10,
because these are the Yamakasi
doing what the Yamakasi does.
A lot of people have asked the question
of whether or not what Jackie Chan did in these movies
could be considered parkour,
because he was technically doing it
before anyone coined the term parkour.
My answer to the question,
and what I think is the objective correct answer anyways,
is yes.
I mean, look at him!
Like, that's a running plyo.
A plyo is when you do a jump with both feet
to land with both feet
and immediately jump again with both feet.
The idea is that you are absorbing with both feet
and using that absorption
as the prep for your next takeoff.
He's throwing his arms the way you should,
but, again, his chest is way too far forward
and he landed face-first into something.
He is jumping onto all kinds of sketchy stuff here.
Things that are soft and unreliable.
In real life, we are not going to be jumping to fabrics.
There's just so much risk for ankles,
for the thing itself collapsing, like it did there,
for it launching you in a way that's unexpected.
We generally like
reliable hard surfaces that are even.
A lot of the moves that Jackie Chan does
in these old movies,
he's famous for his wall runs,
and he'll do speed vaults and laches,
which is swinging off a bar and throwing yourself.
Those are things that Jackie Chan is known for
that fit into the modern toolbox
of parkour moves that we know of today.
For realism, it's a 10 out of 10,
because it's Jackie Chan.
So, this move that David Belle does,
you don't usually see that very often in real life.
Unless there was a gap that was too big to jump,
so you would need to run on the wall
or off a ledge on the wall to get to the other side,
or to get around some bad guys,
like David Belle.
But we generally use the term wall run
to describe going up a wall to tac at,
towards the bottom of the wall,
at an angle with your foot to shoot you upwards
to scale a wall that is too tall to otherwise get up.
A lot of people credit him with being the father of parkour,
but based on my understanding of how things went down,
he invented parkour
along with the rest of the Yamakasi.
I love the chase-down-the-stairway scene.
What makes this scene unique,
compared to a lot of other parkour scenes from film and TV,
is that David Belle is doing a lot of parkour
in a closed and cramped space.
He does a few moves for style points in here
that aren't very efficient,
like he does a reverse at one point,
as he's bounding down the stairs.
But grabbing on to the railings
and generally either doing a speed vault
or a turn vault
to bound and plyo down
is 100% realistic and exactly what you would do
if you were trying to get down the stairs
that fast doing parkour.
Vault to slam the door on the guy.
How'd he know he was there? Was he psychic?
I don't know how he saw him from the other side
of that door.
Explosion!
Classic Yamakasi dramatic roof gap.
David Belle has definitely done roof gaps that big.
He did a very dramatic, kind of flaily,
classic Yamakasi getting away from something explosive.
In real life, you would have
a much more controlled air form.
You would take off and, like I said,
bring your knees in the direction of your chest,
aim your feet at the landing, and roll upon impact,
just like David Belle perfectly did in here.
So, if I were to rate this based on realism,
I would rate it
a 7 or 8 out of 10,
because I can't help but think
about a little bit more than just the parkour
because of his psychic ability
to know where the bad guys were going to be.
What is my favorite parkour scene from film or TV?
That is difficult.
I'm just going to tell you guys to watch the entirety
of the "District B13" movie.
A lot of height drops,
an iconic underbar, going down the staircase.
This was when parkour was still more or less at its infancy.
Thanks for watching!
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