KlangSmithToo

How hard could it be to make a Snake-Eyes movie? He is the epitome of the cool, quiet ninja. He has a great origin story as depicted in 30 years worth of comics and cartoons. Reboot it, fine, but just do that. You have a wealth of source material. Seriously, how hard could it be? As this movie shows you, pretty darn hard.

I am baffled how the team that made this movie could get everything wrong. They assemble a cast that can throw down and fight and the fight scenes are literally seconds long, mostly in the dark, with extremely quick cuts. The acting is sub-par but, to be fair, they weren't given much to work with. I think other reviewers are giving Andrew Koji a pass because of Warrior but he is super cheesy in the role of Storm Shadow. His performance is full of a forced, hammy earnestness as he delivers lines from a comic book movie that sounds like they were written by and for eight year olds. And speaking of eight year olds, one of the "veteran" screenwriters is a veteran of working on terrible Disney sequels like Cinderella 3, Tarzan 2 and Jungle Book 2. Oh, and he wrote 2 Pooh Heffalump movies. He DOES write for eight year olds and it shows here. The story is beyond juvenile and shows little understanding of what is great or interesting about the source material. Even the fan service is completely misplaced here. There is a scene late in the movie where Snake-Eyes walks up to Scarlett right before one of the climactic (non) fight scenes and casually says, "Yo, Joe." But this is an ORIGIN movie and he barely even knows what G. I. Joe is at this point. How would he know to say that? I think the screenwriters were so inept at their craft that they thought they could take a movie about a ninja named Snake-Eyes and build it around a literal pair of dice that only rolls ones and three literal snakes. Anacondas. Not even Cobras.

This whole thing is a hot mess. And not even an interesting mess. A super bland and generic boring mess. It's Snake-Eyes. How do you do that? Thank God this movie tanked so bad that we will probably not be subjected to any more of this nonsense and Larry Hama won't have to pretend that he likes it.

So you are either going to hate this movie (or at least be bored by it) or you are going to love it. It is an art-house dramedy about a disgraced former boxer who is pushing 30 and suffering from too many blows to the head but decides that his dream is to fight once again. It is slow. It takes its time getting there. And for the first hour of the movie, I had it pegged as a solid 4 stars. But I realized at some point deep in the film that I liked these characters and I was invested in the story and my attitude towards it changed. It was creeping up on a high 6 low 7. And then the last 15 minutes brought it all home and I was totally engaged and tearing up and hanging on every word. This movie isn't Rocky or Creed or any other rah, rah sports flick that spikes your testosterone and has you leaping from your seat. It isn't trying to be. To be honest, it's a weird little movie, but it's also kind of beautiful. 8 stars.

I expected so much more. I Saw the Devil is one of the slickest, sickest movies ever put on fim and New World is straight up "The Godfather" of Korean cinema. I was excited to see Hoon-jung Park's latest offering. But it turns out to be just an overlong "extreme" version of a Western teen movie series. Even a lot of the elements are the same. Part Hanna, part Lucy, part X-Men, part Divergent, part whatever, all shaken up and spat out into a bland, uninteresting package. I am baffled by this one. I am used to the slow burn set-ups of Korean movies but the first hour and a half has so little character development and plot progression and world building that it just seems to drag on and on and when the final curtain is drawn and the "real" situation is revealed, I just didn't really care what happens to most of these people. The acting, praised so highly in other reviews, is adequate, but just adequate. The only character I genuinely felt invested in was Woo-sik Choi and that could have just been holdover from Train to Busan. Everyone else were just cardboard cutouts of characters. There is nothing innovative here. Just a mishmash of Western tropes thrown together into Part 1 of a series that feels like it tries too hard to be Part 1 of a series. To be fair, there are about 20 minutes near the end that pull out all of the action stops and are gloriously violent and brutal and bloody and it is very cool to watch. Frankly that is the only reason my rating is 6 stars. Without that scene, this movie is no more than a solid 4. But that's like rating Oldboy solely on the strength of the hallway scene. This movie feels like it could have been great but it turned out not to be nearly enough. Maybe part 2 will correct that mistake.