Post by Thai Ladyboy on May 18, 2014 5:29:28 GMT -6
I just watched this. I went in with full knowledge that it's got mixed reviews (it's got 49% approval from Rotten Tomatoes and the youtube comments on its trailers were brutal), but I honestly found it watchable and a decent homage to classic martial arts films - a little bit from the realistic Shaw films and a little bit from the wuxia stuff during the early 80s. There are complaints that the narrative is too messy and that there's way too many characters, but the people complaining about it probably haven't watched the types of films that it was paying homage to.
It's only got three real fighters/martial artists in the cast (Cung Le is an MMA fighter, Batista's a wrestler, and Byron Mann is a wushu practitioner) but the fight scenes didn't really showcase any of their skills, relying more on wires and CG, but they look good enough to watch. It's not crouching tiger hidden dragon or Hero as far as story goes, but it's serviceable and accomplished its purpose, which is to give all of these martial artists a reason to kill each other. There's gore and sleaze, but nothing too offensive or vomit inducing. The scenes of prostitutes having sex were shown very briefly and they are wearing clothes so no unnecessary skin was shown. The bloody parts are nothing out of the ordinary. They're tame enough to be shown on primetime TV - a stab here and there, throats getting slit, etc. There's probably a total of four really gory scenes, but they were fast cuts. Nothing on the level of Eli Roth's movies.
I only have two complaints, first is the soundtrack. I get that they're trying to juxtapose the retro martial arts visuals with modern music, but hip hop doesn't lend itself well to fast paced wire-fu. The scenes that used industrial rock as a score flowed better.
Next is RZA. The guy can't act at all. He looks lost and he delivers lines like a high school kid performing on a school play.
