Game of Assassins

Saw this in the festival circuit last year when it was titled 'The Gauntlet.' It's a little bit of Saw and a little bit of DaVinci Code.

Five strangers wake up in what seems to be a labyrinthine or underground castle with no memory of how they got there. Their relationships to one another are unknown, and the loyalties they form for survival are tenuous at best. Each level of this dungeon proves a grueling challenge where the price to move forward is often another person's life. Along the way, a sense of each person's past and a glimmer of their true character peeks through. In fact this is the more enjoyable aspect of the feature. I respected the internal life of these characters and learning who they were.

Meanwhile, blood, much blood, much death. Bai Ling (The Beautiful Country, The Crow) is fantastic as a disturbed and merciless survivalist. Though the least of the actors that needs to prove themselves on an ostensibly low-budget genre flick, Bai Ling goes for broke, covered in blood for basically the entire film. Another treat was the casting of Dustin Nguyen (The Rebel) whose performance is one of subtlety and dignity. The Gauntlet is what it is. It goes for broke and I had fun while it did.

With how bad this movie is.

The movie start well, the setup is intriguing. Nothing groundbreaking, but the typical "Saw" kind of mystery, with a small group of people not knowing what is happening or why, and around untrustworthy people.

And yet, the dialogue is absolutely awful, the reeeeally slow revelation of the secrets annoying and when it's all said and done, you realize that there are an incredible amount of plotholes and the conclusion is not satisfaying enough to overcome the lack of production values, dialogues and acting.

The Gauntlet. A handful of strangers, all of whom have previously killed, find themselves trapped in a deadly and mysterious building. It soon becomes a fight for survival with challenging Biblical riddles to solve along the way. The Running Man and Saw are two movies that sprung to mind, with added Satanic references. There's plenty of violence and action to help pass it's relatively short running time, bit of suspense too. The ending is a bit hard to swallow though. Ba Ling, who was 47 at the time, looks fantastic. A reasonable if instantly forgettable time filler.

In a sunken castle, 5 people awaken with little to no memory of how they got there. They quickly learn that they are being tested and find that they must band together to try to figure out how to escape. But who is responsible for their imprisonment and why have these 5 specific people being chosen?

The Gauntlet or Game Of Assassins as it is otherwise known is very similar in feel to Cube (another film where a group of strangers are locked in together and must work together and solve puzzles to escape). Predictably this results in a film that isn't particularly fresh or original...

Having said that, in this film it really doesn't matter too much as the camera is always busy and the film rarely sits still - there is just about enough exposition and character development to get an understanding of what is going on, but it's never overdone here and although this film is flawed it is never dull.

One complaint I did have with this film was the dark and dingy look of the film; sure it's necessary to an extent due to where they are located, but at times it was impossible to see what was going on which in some ways removed some of the tension from proceedings. The editing and choreography of some of the fight sequences was also poor and amateurish which resulted in a lot of these fight sequences being a bit laughable.

The cast are all OK, but no-one really makes much of an impression truth be told and they do all feel like clichés of characters that I've seen before.

I don't want to be too harsh on this film as it is, to be fair, moderately entertaining and at only 80 minutes long it gets the job done without any needless filler, crass subplots or soppy romances. However, it's never as good as the films that it has borrowed from which is problematic and ultimately renders it as a second-rate variation.

The international title is a bit ... strange to say the least. But I reckon it works as good as anything else. And maybe better than The Gauntlet. You could call this the Cube underneath ... or something along those lines. Since Cube came out - movie tried to copy the formula. Some with more, some with less success.

I think this has some very interesting moments. Unfortunately even the charisma of the actors is not going to be able to save this entirely. But it might elevate it to a certain degree (no pun intended). That being said, the thrill and the suspense is being kept until the end. And if you like the actors (at least one of them, no matter the character they portray), you will have something to hold on to.

The end and some of the twists may feel stretched to say the least here too - but maybe you have given up on thinking too much about stuff and just give in and sort of enjoy whatever this low budget effort means and tries to do (for you)