Let me begin with saying, if you aren’t a bad martial arts film nerd or an honorary Wu-Tang member, you should go ahead and skip this movie.
Yet, though you are neither of those things you keep reading. Arrg.
Well anyway, the plot doesn’t matter.
There’s a bunch of people who have to keep having fights in the same, tragically centrally located, inn.
The fights are interesting visually, but the bar for stylized on screen fighting has risen too high for this to be any sort of achievement. Don’t go backwards guys.
Several actors (Lucy Liu and Russel Crowe especially) are quite charming and funny. Crowe’s scenes are actually the best part of the film. He plays a fat, opium adicted, Englishman who’s fairly handy with a knife. Upon purchasing 3 prostitutes he says,”We’re now going to play a little game I call, ‘Let’s pretend we’re Catholic'” as he produces what I hope was a paperweight (but I doubt it). Lucy Liu plays a stock character as a whorehouse madam, one of her gifts is bringing life to ‘stock’ characters. If it weren’t for Crowe’s debauched Englishman, she’d be the strength of the film.
RZA, who wrote the film, is a blacksmith who’s trying to buy the contract of a whore he fell in love with. And she’s easily the best looking one. But basically there’s no life in his character and I failed to see why I should give a shit.
And there are other people in the movie, David Batista shows up as Chinese knockoff Colossus or something. But basically the plot is just a device to destroy this poor inn. I think the inn and brothel were in different places but I’m not certain.
Is this better than Expendables? Yes. The action was watchable, no Planet Hollywood owners were cast, a coherent sentence was uttered occasionally, and there was a small amount of humor. All things Expendables lacked.
Does that mean anything? No. I enjoy martial arts films, even bad ones, if there’s something compelling (usually the fighting). I was pretty fucking bored with this one. Also, I’m not sure how Eli Roth got his rep. Every movie he’s written or directed has been utter ballsack. Don’t even bring up Hostel. A solid porn director could top that. So now I’m supposed to get excited that some cocksmoke who’s never been involved in a good movie (except as a Bear Jew) and a music guy wrote a kung fu movie? All that seperates from this and a flunking film school project is the budget.
I’d keep an eye on RZA, the visuals were interesting. He just needs to work with an actual writer next time.
I also heard that Crowe’s character is supposed to be a white English version of ODB. And that actually makes sense having viewed the movie.
But final verdict, skip it. Listen for RZA and see if his next movie has an actual writer attached.