The Gauntlet

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.

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)

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.

I just finished watching this, and I was pleasantly surprised. It's about 5 people who get trapped in some sort of ancient-like dungeon. There are a couple different rooms they have to get into in order to escape the gauntlet - which was the original title of the movie - and each room has a puzzle they have to solve before they can advance. Generally, a blood sacrifice of sorts has to be made.

Bai Ling (Red Corner, The Crow) and Warren Kole (24, The Following) lead the cast. This is probably the first movie since Red Corner that Bai Ling has been in in which she did not play some tramp, slut, or bimbo. She was actually allowed to act, and she did a good job. Plus she looks really good. She's close to 50, but looks half that age. I always thought she'd be a Chinese superstar like Li Bingbing and Xiang Ziyi, but for some unfortunate reason that didn't happen.

There are deaths in this movie, which I knew there would be, but I was still surprised at some of those who were killed. I can't say this was all that original, but it was pretty well done for what it was. The poster for this film doesn't make much sense when compared to the actual movie.

I recommend this movie. I gave it a 6-star rating. I might revisit that later, but I tend to rate a movie based on how I feel right after viewing it. Perhaps this deserves more like a 5-star rating, but even though the material has been done before, as I said earlier, they did a good job on it.