For 15 years, the best thing the ballsy U.K.-based parkour team known as Storror could say for a successful stunt — whether jumping off a cliff together or leaping between tall buildings for videos they uploaded to YouTube — was that none of them had died in the process. But now, with a wealth of law-breaking footage to their name, the seven-member posse has not only their lives to show for it, but also a feature-length Michael Bay movie to commemorate their exploits.
In “We Are Storror,” the bombastic auteur (who first engaged the pro parkour group for spectacular sequences in his 2019 film “6 Underground”) assembles a career-spanning supercut in their honor. Bay insists he was far from the action at all times, coming in only at the end to sift through and edit what Storror had documented on their own. But there’s no denying the influence Bay’s splashy hero-worship aesthetic has had on their own shooting style (low angles, multiple-camera coverage, slow motion and so on), as they do sky-high tricks so risky, you may clench your eyes to keep from fainting at times.
And just who are Storror? That would be daredevil buddies Max and Benj Cave (brothers whose middle names are both Storror), Callum and Sacha Powell (also brothers), Drew Taylor, Toby Segar and Josh Burnett-Blake, who started out simply horsing around, filming pranks and sharing them online. Fast forward more than 10 million followers (the kind of quick cut Bay’s known for), and they’ve left their English towns of Horsham and Peacehaven to conquer walls and rooftops the world over.
Since Storror’s greatest stunts are easily watched online, the hook here is to give audiences a behind-the-scenes look at four ambitious new challenges: dashing down the zig-zag stairs of Portugal’s Varossa Dam, turning an abandoned Bulgarian holiday resort (the Costa Del Croco) into their personal jungle gym, scaling balconies and sprinting across roofs in Malta, before wrapping things up in a giant sand quarry back home in England. They’re all visually stunning locations that pose separate risks, though the doc makes clear just how much prep goes into each performance.
Late in the film, one of the group refers to having “parkour vision” — looking at urban structures and seeing the potential to jump, slide and scamper across them — and that description makes you realize just how deeply the mindset impacts how they move through the world. Most of what they do is illegal, either because “everything is private property” (as they put it) or else because no city wants to take liability for the tiny miscalculation that could cost these show-offs their lives.
The cops come off as clowns in Storror’s footage, which is sometimes so directly aligned with these anarchist/athlete/artists’ point of view that they’re filming through GoPros clenched between their teeth. The illicit nature of their hobby clearly supplies some of the appeal, for spectators and participants alike, though they’ve been at it long enough to know none of them is invincible — as an especially wince-inducing montage roughly 75 minutes in makes clear, showing all the bad falls, snapped ankles and broken legs they’ve sustained on camera.
“We would be the fastest bank robbers in the world,” speculates one. “We just couldn’t carry the bring because it’s too heavy.”
The documentary never really explains how they make their money. Maybe Bay really is serious about his “Don’t try this at home” warning (which comes with the added line, “You could wind up dead or worse”), withholding the tips that would make it easy for others to follow their example. It’s likely some combination of sponsors and merch, though it’s a testament to the director that the doc doesn’t simply feel like one long commercial — especially since that’s basically the mode in which most of his movies are made.
Parkour is such an inherently spectacular sport that Bay mostly has to stay out of his own way, structuring the film around the seven individuals. He actually spends more time character-building here than he did in “6 Underground,” including endearing moments of relatability, like the one where Josh relocates to the living room of his apartment, since his Abyssinian cat’s claimed the bedroom, or a sequence involving Sacha (who went to a top film school to improve his Storror videos) in hospital during the pandemic, recovering not from COVID but a gnarly leg injury.
The bar is high on such movies, as seen in last year’s “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” which grew out of the DIY skate videos of the 1980s and have evolved into a kind of self-sustaining career option for those undaunted by the fact that audiences want to see ever-riskier stunts. In “Minding the Gap,” director Bing Liu went deeper, mining the psychology and shared trauma of his childhood friends, but Bay never uncovers anything so profound here. Would Sacha Powell have succeeded if he’d made the film himself? Maybe, though no one can compete with Bay in the adrenaline department.
