I combattenti

Ultimately unfulfilling, long winded movie that fails to satisfy on any level. The two leads are effective, but the plot(such as it is) is plodding. Things deteoriate even further by the time mickey rourke turns up shortly before the end.

Rourkes botched surgery is so ghastly it detracts from what little impact the weak ending might have had.

Not recommended.

When it started I was wondering a bit why it was rated so low, because I thought it was watchable at least.

But when the second half started that became painfully obvious.

The movie starts out as sort of a illegal street-fighting movie but with armored vest shooting at each other instead of boxing and kicking each other.

And it builds itself up to make you think that it's gonna get more and more intense as it goes on, so the second half is so anticlimactic it's not even funny.

It turns into some wannabe philosophical wonderings drama movie instead, and it has one of the most abrupt endings I've seen in a long while which literally made me ask 'seriously?' out loud to the TV-screen.

And in the end I have no idea what the movie was trying to say or why it was even made in the first place.

So yeah definitely not recommended, to the Mickey Rourke fans I'd like to point out that he doesn't show up until the last 9 minutes.

If you are looking for action, just forget it. There isn't any. Most of the film is uninteresting chatter. It is very slow paced and terribly boring film.

My recommendation: Skip it.

My vote: 1/10.

This one could have been something like Bloodsport (starring JCVD) or Salute of the Jugger (also know as The Blood of Heroes, starring Rutger Hauer) but with guns. Sadly, we get instead way too much (boring) talking, chattering, then some more talking, and, sadly too, not enough gunfights and action. The actors are not to blame, they do solid, also the production is solid for a movie on a B-movie budget, but the story is rather confused, taking away that great premise/idea and focusing on whatever the writer got in mind to achieve (I'm not sure what it was). So Blunt Force Trauma does not reach the great heavens of cheesy and entertaining action B-movie flicks but falls into the terrible pit of the almost-good ones that are to be forgotten but by a few lost souls.

This is not a very good film. Straight to the point, eh? It's about people who stand in a small circle clad in bulletproof vests who then proceed to draw guns and shoot each other in an underground gunfighter/duel type thingy. Bets are placed, money exchanged etc, etc.

It's at one of these bizarre events we met John and Colt, our films leads, who hit it off an embark on a road trip of sorts.

The film tries hard to aspire to some kind of gunslinger noir but with little plot and thinly drawn characters it all feels a bit contrived. On the plus side one of the films leads, Colt is played by the stunningly beautiful Freida Pinto so there's that at least, and it's cinematography is pretty tidy too. There's also a late appearance from Mickey Rourke,a truly gifted actor but his appearance now a days must surely frighten children and his cameo is rather naff. On the whole this picture is attempting to be cool and moody but it just all feels a bit hackneyed and trite.