wlpeak

True to his action thriller credentials even when Friedkin flops it's more a train wreck than a dud.

Poor acting from great actors, terrible plotting & scene transitions, an inevitable car chase more an embarrassment to the genre than an homage to his former mastery, what else... well let's start from the beginning.

Supposedly set in a Kosovo village, we open with a scene, for all it's over-done pyrotechnics, more reminiscent of an oil refinery disaster than ethnic cleansing massacre, proving that Friedkin has no immunity to the plague of CGI overkill. The Serbians evil-doers are so poorly directed, that they fail to take even the simplest of precautions during explosions and bombings preferring instead it seems to just keep maniacally slaying the odd clump of villagers made up mothers and clean, cute, little girls, shot in multiple close-up vignettes lest we idiots in the back row fail to notice the pathos.

Del Toro's Hallem is somehow, not shown, pushed over the edge by this, or something. Anyway, we end up years later in a forest where he goes after some hunters with a knife displaying ghost-like skill missing later in the movie. The hunters seem to know that they are to be hunted and react to hearing a disembodied voice in the woods by turning their guns in his direction. Or maybe they were just really paranoid? I dunno. So they die and in comes Jones' Bonham, a back woods tracker who happens to also be Hallem's old combat/survival trainer from long ago. Okie dokie. Of course the FBI have to defer to Bonham and let him 'track' Hallem all over the woods and through Portland as well giving us the framework of the flick.

Jone's looks old and tired in this movie and I never once believed he was up to the numerous combats he has with Del Torro, but he also delivers his lines in a clipped unconvincing fashion. Speaking of bad acting, Del Torro seems to put little thought into his delivery or character. What to make of these two fine actors slumming through this movie?

The knife fighting was fun and mainly well done and the forest scenery was pretty, but we would have done just as well with Stallone and Richard Crenna reprising their original roles, and sadly, Kotcheff too.

If you reside in the real world, then this movie will strike you as naive, crude, and bigoted. Credit should be given for the attempt to set the movie outside of China, but the snarky Europeans hired to play Americans, a bunch of undersized frenchmen no doubt ;'), and the heavy handed evil Americans routine, departs from realism pretty quickly.

Halfway through, the plot mutates into the martial-arts as magic universe, and though a lot of work is put into CGI effects, there is nothing here for anyone who hasn't been living in a cave for the last decade to write home about.

We also get a dose of infantile romantic complications that would embarrass Aaron Spelling, some really cheesy music, and generally lame melodramatic scenes.

My favorite, an inexplicable fastcut sequence from several angles of Hero standing in a burning building holding Jade as she dies, the music tracks dramatically with the cuts, is he trapped? ...will he die? Nope he just walks out a second later. What the...?

The plot tumbles on with a Ninja vs Chinese subplot, and then for some reason climaxes with a Chinese revolt against the 'Racist men fom the Klu Klux Klan' who run a mine where Chinese workers are oppressed. Someone's been carping their history from 'The Peoples History of the US' it seems.

If I had to classify this movie I'd use Sword and Sorcery with too much dialogue and dialectic.