The Gauntlet

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.

I'm sure there are some people who will be convinced this movie contains some sort of hidden truths, but I'm not. There's almost no plot, not much dialogue and we learn very little about the characters - worse, we don't care about any of them anyway.

What little plot there is, as it turns out, ends up with several big holes in it. The ending takes place in the last 5 minutes, because the writer obviously just ran out of ideas (or paper). It's trudge, trudge, trudge for 75 minutes, then a disappointing ending so devoid of anything useful that the viewer just ends up with nothing. If someone had suggested to me that this movie might end this way, I'd think he was kidding.

This movie was showing on HBO one Sunday against all of the infomercials, and I got curious. I thought it might be a fun little action flick, but an old Jackie Chan movie would have been a hundred times more entertaining.

Tat from start to finish! There is no story, no sense to anyone's actions, they just bumble along boring the viewer. If you want to watch something similar but way better then look at the SAW films.

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.