Parkour in popular culture

Parkour—an activity with the aim of moving from one point to another as efficiently and quickly as possible, using principally the abilities of the human body—has appeared in various television advertisements, news reports and entertainment pieces, sometimes combined with other forms of acrobatics like free running, street stunts and tricking. Such acrobatics are not part of parkour.

Films

 * Banlieue 13 features parkour and stars David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli.


 * Casino Royale features Sébastien Foucan in a chase taking place early in the movie that implements many aspects of parkour, specifically Foucan's related discipline of freerunning. The mainstream success of Casino Royale served to bring parkour to the attention of a wider audience and was emblematic of that movie's attempt to unite the superheroics of the James Bond franchise with a "real world" aesthetic.  Casino Royale's release sparked a renewed media interest in parkour and related disciplines and a large amount of recent mainstream parkour coverage dates to around Casino Royale's release.  Along with The Bourne Ultimatum, Casino Royale is credited with starting a new wave of parkour-inspired stunts in Western film and television.


 * Breaking and Entering includes a parkour scene.


 * Live Free or Die Hard includes a parkour sequence.

Literature

 * Issue 6 of the limited series Global Frequency, written by noted comic book author Warren Ellis, tells the story of a young traceuse named Sita Patel who is tasked with the seemingly impossible mission of crossing London in under twenty minutes to defuse a biological weapon. The issue, titled The Run, is a varied and detailed (and mostly believable) treatment of the topic and remains one of the most memorable issues of the comic's publication. The series was published by Wildstorm Comics. In 2004, Global Frequency was nominated for an Eisner Award.  This depiction in a critically acclaimed series by a high-profile speculative fiction writer helped give parkour a fashionable, exotic, and mysterious image among a young, educated and trend-conscious demographic.

Television

 * Cops and Robbers includes Parkour sequences.


 * The Australian version of 60 Minutes featured a segment of parkour on September 16, 2007, which featured Sébastien Foucan on a trip to Australia, and French traceur Stephane Vigroux.

Video games

 * In Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed II, the character that the player controls exercises parkour.


 * Crackdown is an Xbox 360 action game which has been claimed to feature parkour elements. The elements in question are high running speeds, a superhuman ability to jump vertically and horizontally (in some cases clearing entire buildings) and an emphasis on gripping and vaulting from ledges and protruding objects.  These elements are designed to make players feel fully in control of their own movement, and by extension fully in control of their environment (the city in which the game takes place), and are noteworthy within a wider movement in game design to achieve these goals.


 * Tony Hawk's American Wasteland: one of the several techniques you can learn whilst not on your skateboard is freerunning, although it is called parkour in the game. Also, you can wall-run, wire-grab and other parkour movements.


 * Mirror's Edge is a 2008 videogame notable for having its core gameplay consist of parkour-inspired acrobatics including wall-running, vaulting, break-falls and kick-and-spin jumps. Rather than using movement as a means to travel between goals, Mirror's Edge made movement itself the goal, and allowed players to overcome armed opponents by outrunning and outmaneuvering them rather than engaging them with violence.  The game was innovative for presenting this movement-focused gameplay from a first-person perspective, depicting the main character's arms or feet coming into the player's field of view in a way that in earlier first-person games like Doom and Half-Life was used to depict guns or tools, and thereby using the game's interface to coach players to use their avatar's body and athleticism to solve problems rather than weapons or objects.