Arcade Pictures, Iron Fists,
Russell Crowe, Cung Le, Lucy Liu, RZA, Rick Yune, Batista, Jamie Chung, Byron Mann, Daniel Wu, Zhu Zhu
Combining Martial Arts and Hip-Hop, a band of warriors, assassins, and a British soldier all arrive at a village in ancient China, where a humble blacksmith (RZA) looks to defend himself and his fellow villagers from the marauders seeking a treasure of gold.
This movie has Quentin Tarantino all over it, but I can’t see where he’s involved in the film in the least, nor do I see any of his style of film making. I suspect he just put up the money for the project. RZA, whatever the hell that is, is a rapper from the infamous Wu-Tang Clan who has dreamed (according to the special features on the film) of making a Kung Fu movie since his early teens. Well, now he’s got a boatload of money and is able to do whatever he wants. So it’s his directorial debut, as well as his chance to play the lead in the film. Now some long time professional actors have tried to act and direct at the same time, with some very iffy mixed results. But for a first timer to take this on, is really dubious. What results is an amateur looking mess that looks like a high school project shot after school. Now they spent the money to travel to China to film this, but the script is really weak, and the performances are dreadful. With such well knows actors as Russell Crowe and Lucy Liu, it looks like they were trying to get some talent in there, but the script is so bad, they can’t pull anything out of the sewer. Basically this may be just an attempt for RZA to have a platform for his music, and the stuff in here is really incompatible with a martial arts film.
Now I am a big martial arts fan, and am usually pretty forgiving, but I really think this is one of the worst messes I have ever seen, and I cannot recommend this at all. I imagine that the professional critics must agree on this stinker, and all you need to do is to watch the self serving special features on the CD to see where it went wrong. Just let this one go, it’s not even worth the rental.
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
