A Certain Justice

I do not usually judge films as awful I am not a movie snob, but this film has nothing.

I struggled to watch an hour of this and had to turn it off as I really couldn't care less about what happened next or to who.

I love movies of all genres but this had no entertainment factor at all. I had no empathy with the main character John and sadly couldn't find any reason to keep watching.

Maybe something amazing happens in the latter part of the movie but for me this was just a bad action flick that showed us nothing we haven't seen a hundred times before done a hundred times better elsewhere.

Save yourself from this boredom and pick another one to watch.

Wow. I would like to have been a fly on the wall when this piece of utter detritus was first pitched. I have not seen a movie so ridiculous, so badly written, so comically badly acted, so full of terrible clichés in decades, if ever.

Cung Le is devoid of any acting talent and would be well advised to not quit his day job, whatever that may be. Dolph Lundgren is obviously "past it" and looks like a total alcoholic has-been in this horrible production.

Blood flows freely, people die like flies, but acting and any genuine character development are absent and might not even have been able to rescue this turkey. I started laughing out loud at one point when even the fight scenes were so preposterous that even a four year old would not have believed them.

Save your money. Don't even wait for it to go to cable. Just don't go and say you did. You'll be better off.

When this movie popped up on Netflix recently, I decided to give it a look since it had Dolph Lundgren in it, one of my favorite B movie actors. Also, with this movie he returned to his acting roots of playing a bad guy after so many years of playing heroes. Sadly, this novelty did nothing towards saving this pretty bad movie. There are many problems with the movie, but the main problems are that the movie is very slow and boring. The pacing is sluggish, and there are some plot holes and murky plot details that reek of amateurish writing. The movie could have been livened up by some good action, but the movie disappoints in this area as well. Believe it or not, in the first hour of the movie, there are only about two minutes of footage that could safely be called "action". And when the action does come, it's choreographed, directed, and edited in a way that comes across like the protagonist (or antagonists) are not skilled at all in hand to hand combat (or other kinds of combat, for that matter.) As for the acting, lead actor Cung Le (who in many scenes looks like Cuba Gooding Jr.) is really bland and lacking charisma, and Lundgren gives a very lazy and unemotional performance, clearly just being here for the paycheck. Not the worst action movie I've seen, but it's so boring that I would only recommend it for insomniacs.

A CERTAIN JUSTICE, aka PUNCTURE WOUNDS, is another nondescript straight-to-DVD action film starring Cung Le, who certainly impresses as a fighter. It's just a shame that this film's fight choreography is unremittingly awful, constantly cutting away from hits and adding in fake stylistics which spoil the pace and impact of the fights. I was lured by the UK DVD cover, which features a short-haired Dolph Lundgren and Vinnie Jones, but it's a cheat as both have more minor roles as bad guys. The plot is serviceable and perhaps with a bigger budget this might have been more impactful, but as it stands it's pretty disastrous.

The minute Lundgren saw the wig and facial hair his character would have, he should have known this was a film he should have steered clear from. It's not good, the script is bad, the acting is fairly poor, and the plot unoriginal.

It is coherent, so if you want an action film offering nothing more than a bit of violence, then this absolutely fits the bill. The final fight scene is actually pretty good too, so you have that choreography to look forward to, but the rest are a bit hit and miss.

It's really the dialogue that makes Puncture Wounds/A Certain Kind of Justice so poor though. Cringeworthy narration to bookend the film and the most ridiculously placed "It's okay, bro" within the script. So it's difficult to see if the acting is bad, or the material the cast had to work with just tripped them up. To be fair, Evigan (the only woman with lines) does okay, Vinnie Jones does his job (but very much typecast), and Lundgren passes, but really Le as the lead doesn't excel in anything but kicking.

Also shout out to the most shoe-horned scene possible, where a secondary character has to deal with an ill loved one whilst getting visited a rip-off Colonel Trautman.