11 Blocks

This film though low to no budget is interesting to watch and a bit realistic. It involves martial arts trained man battling several gangs as he travels many city blocks to save his sister from a hired assassin.Does he succeed? Watch and see. The ending may surprise you as will the over all plot. Though low budget the fact that a lot of the things in this movie goes along with today's world is no coincidence i do believe. Many of the things portrayed in this film show how some of our people and children are living or having to live and it is a shame that in a country as great as ours these things exist. Maybe we need to view this film as a wake up warning and correct some of our societies problems. Watch. Enjoy. Learn.

The plot: To rescue his sister, a tough guy has to fight his way through 11 blocks of a gang-controlled, dystopian city.

In a film like this, I have two major concerns: fight choreography and stunts. Sure, if the direction or acting is crap, it can be distracting, but for a no-budget action film, my standards are pretty low. This film has some pretty good action scenes. The biggest problem that the choreographers never really solved the problem of how to show one man fight against an entire gang. In most of the scenes, he fights them one-by-one, and the other people pretty much just stand around and wait for their turn to get their asses kicked. I generally prefer when the hero uses an ingenious strategy to even the odds, but this is more like side-scrolling arcade game. It's a failed opportunity to show us action fans something we haven't seen before.

The editing is probably going to bother many people. This isn't the kind of film where you really have much of a plot, so when you need to pad the runtime, it's either flashbacks or extended sex scenes. There's one scene at a strip club, but this film generally goes with flashbacks. Lots of flashbacks. In fact, several of them are repeated two or three times. However, after you get past the first 20 or 30 minutes, they become less common. Many of the flashbacks are from our protagonist's earlier life, when he was trained by his brutal father. Whenever he failed to perfectly execute a move, his father would beat him. While these scenes can be fun to watch for those who enjoy martial arts demonstrations, others will probably tire of them quickly.

If you're forgiving of low budget action films, then it can't hurt to give it a try. Maybe it's sign of how many bad action films I've seen over the years, but I've seen much worse.