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.<\/p>\n
Yet, though you are neither of those things you keep reading.\u00a0 Arrg.<\/p>\n
Well anyway, the plot doesn’t matter.<\/p>\n
There’s a bunch of people who have to keep having fights in the same, tragically centrally located, inn.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Don’t go backwards guys.<\/p>\n
Several actors (Lucy Liu and Russel Crowe especially) are quite charming and funny.\u00a0 Crowe’s scenes are actually the best part of the film.\u00a0 He plays a fat, opium adicted, Englishman who’s fairly handy with a knife.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 Lucy Liu plays a stock character as a whorehouse madam, one of her gifts is bringing life to ‘stock’ characters.\u00a0 If it weren’t for Crowe’s debauched Englishman, she’d be the strength of the film.<\/p>\n
RZA, who wrote the film, is a blacksmith who’s trying to buy the contract of a whore he fell in love with.\u00a0 And she’s easily the best looking one.\u00a0 But basically there’s no life in his character and I failed to see why I should give a shit.<\/p>\n
And there are other people in the movie, David Batista shows up as Chinese knockoff Colossus or something.\u00a0 But basically the plot is just a device to destroy this poor inn.\u00a0 I think the inn and brothel were in different places but I’m not certain.<\/p>\n
Is this better than Expendables<\/em>?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 The action was watchable, no Planet Hollywood owners were cast, a coherent sentence was uttered occasionally, and there was a small amount of humor.\u00a0 All things Expendables<\/em> lacked.<\/p>\n Does that mean anything?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I enjoy martial arts films, even bad ones, if there’s something compelling (usually the fighting).\u00a0 I was pretty fucking bored with this one.\u00a0 Also, I’m not sure how Eli Roth got his rep.\u00a0 Every movie he’s written or directed has been utter ballsack.\u00a0 Don’t even bring up Hostel<\/em>.\u00a0 A solid porn director could top that.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 All that seperates from this and a flunking film school project is the budget.<\/p>\n I’d keep an eye on RZA, the visuals were interesting.\u00a0 He just needs to work with an actual writer next time.<\/p>\n I also heard that Crowe’s character is supposed to be a white English version of ODB.\u00a0 And that actually makes sense having viewed the movie.<\/p>\n But final verdict, skip it.\u00a0 Listen for RZA and see if his next movie has an actual writer attached.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 Arrg. Well … Continue reading