The Gauntlet

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)

In a sunken castle, 5 people awaken with little to no memory of how they got there. They quickly learn that they are being tested and find that they must band together to try to figure out how to escape. But who is responsible for their imprisonment and why have these 5 specific people being chosen?

The Gauntlet or Game Of Assassins as it is otherwise known is very similar in feel to Cube (another film where a group of strangers are locked in together and must work together and solve puzzles to escape). Predictably this results in a film that isn't particularly fresh or original...

Having said that, in this film it really doesn't matter too much as the camera is always busy and the film rarely sits still - there is just about enough exposition and character development to get an understanding of what is going on, but it's never overdone here and although this film is flawed it is never dull.

One complaint I did have with this film was the dark and dingy look of the film; sure it's necessary to an extent due to where they are located, but at times it was impossible to see what was going on which in some ways removed some of the tension from proceedings. The editing and choreography of some of the fight sequences was also poor and amateurish which resulted in a lot of these fight sequences being a bit laughable.

The cast are all OK, but no-one really makes much of an impression truth be told and they do all feel like clichés of characters that I've seen before.

I don't want to be too harsh on this film as it is, to be fair, moderately entertaining and at only 80 minutes long it gets the job done without any needless filler, crass subplots or soppy romances. However, it's never as good as the films that it has borrowed from which is problematic and ultimately renders it as a second-rate variation.

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.

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.

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.