The Rookies

Chinese try to make an EXPENDABLE movie and fail terribly. Just awful. Sad to see her go the way of Bruce Willis and Nicholas Cage, no script too bad.

Milla Jovovich ... I mean she enriches everything she does ... doesn't she? That's a rhetorical question of course. Unfortunately she is not the main focus here ... and you will probably feel the same way - especially after she has that really great action scene near the start of the movie.

That aside and also the weird fact that Prime (Germany) decided to either have the movie dubbed in German or have the english track only (every chinese actor being dubbed, almost hillariously so, when we have a translator for Milla as one example) - which did not work in the movies favour let me tell you that much ... all that aside, the movie has some really nice action and stunt set pieces.

And these are the things that really safe the movie ... the jokes are way more miss than hit ... but if you like silly things, you may find more things enticing here than most of the other viewers.

I would describe this movie as a poorly crafted spy movie for kids, with an overblown budget and one of the worst scripts ever written for it's type. The pacing of this movie is off, and so is the editing at times. The dialogue (of varying noticeable-qualities when Milla is talking vs the dubbed English on the Blu-Ray) is terrible, which doesn't help the over-acted characters. When a bad guy says "hot tamales!" you know what you are in for.. Milla's cringy participation must have been backed by a big paycheck, but it's a role that is not beneath her movie history of garbage. The rest of the seemingly-super-famous actors are equally as bad.

The tone is all over the place (and the emotional parts are laughable), and there's nothing particularly memorable aside from the mess that it is. It goes off the rails on what I think is the last bit.

Beautiful locations and color usage, though! The movie is gorgeous and wonderfully crafted visually (except some CGI). Some decent parkour and post production (animations).

But is it worth watching? No. After a while, you stop laughing against the movie and being surprised by its nonsense.

I have to purposely login just to give it a low vote 1 for the effort.

IT IS BADDDDD. It Motivates me to give it a 1.

It's not Bad enough to be Good. And not even good enough, it's bad even though with decent budget it clearly have.

Lazy Scripting is plain Bad when they try to be funny it's not really funny, when it's serious the feeling is just not there, it just doesn't fit together well.' The Asian actors is bad really bad. Lots of improvements needed.

Bad character developments. For one example, the main character is a risk taker & do extreme sports like parkour, but he's like physically impaired & shame himself multiple time. Inconsistent given logic, when you give a show a bad logic at least make it consistent.

So many negative reviews from negative-Nancies! It's an action comedy and not meant to be serious. Imho, had more action than the latest Bond movie almost made me fall asleep.

Yes, subpar camerawork, acting and amateurish directing and story is in a comedy-fantasy area, but I've seen much much worse from Hollywood blockbusters.

Overall, good movie for a night 5.7/10.