The Warrior's Way (2010)
Director - Sngmoo Lee
R; 100 Min
Cast
Don-Gung Jang - Yang
Kate Bosworth - Lynne
Geoffrey Rush - Ron
I am completely baffled that the current ratings for the new film The Warrior's Way sit at 40% on http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ yet 70% on http://www.imdb.com/. How it crept over 30% on either site seems silly as this is nothing more than a film that takes a wild and creative thought and completely butchers the execution. Not only does the 70% rating blow my mind, but it makes me wonder if anyone anywhere at anytime can ever trust an imdb rating ever again (And yes, I too love The Shawshank Redemption.)
With that said, this isn't the worst movie I have seen this year. There is some decent action, but most of the good stuff happens way after the half way point, which means 50minutes of set up for a film that needs no more than 15. The problem is that it all just feels like the crew picked apart every single aspect they liked about Westerns and Ninja genres from all of time and tried to splice them together to create a super-movie about westerns and ninjas. It doesn't work well.
At the heart of the failure is Kate Bosworth (my ex-wife from the Blue Crush days) who absolutely mutilates her role as the only good looking young woman in a town of gunslingers and whores. Someone gave her the idea (the director? perhaps?) that she should play an 'aww-shucks' and 'woe is me' type of character, when in reality her character is seething with an inner want for revenge against the man who killed her family. Her training sessions with Yang (played by Korean star Don-Gung Jang) are comical at best as she goes from poor stuttering can't hit a barn wall with a rock girl to amazingly skilled ninja warrior to let me give him a kiss and giggle like a school girl. How can this possibly work? It can't.
Can someone explain to me how Geoffrey Rush got in this film? I can only assume he stumbled onto the set drunk one day and nobody had the heart to tell him to leave. The guy has an Oscar yet here he is about as useful as Josh Brolin's Jonah Hex, scarred face and all.
The movie is rated R which is good because it crosses the line in a lot of spots for a film that doesn't feel like it should be R. Pedophile rape possibilities abound as ninja warriors and western cowboys shed more blood than a Tarantino film and somewhere in the middle of it all is a plot about a baby that Yang wouldn't kill...or something like that.
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