Jiu Jitsu

[Drunk Monk]

Yeah, someone here had to jump on this grenade. You can thank me later.

Oh man, this is worse that expected. It's basically Predator, only it's set in Myanmar (where filming is cheap?) and instead of the alien being a trophy hunter, it just likes to fight humans. And there's this inexplicable band of humans who are chosen to duel against the alien, one on one. 

You may read reviews that say this is so bad that it's kinda good. They are wrong. It's just bad.

The lead is Alain Moussi and he's terrible, upstaged by pretty much every other member of the cast. 

Nic Cage - his goofball performance is a welcome relief. There needed to be a whole lot more of him. I confess I like Nic. He's the only redeemable character here. That says a lot. 

There are some decent fights. The opening fight sequence when Tony Jaa breaks Alain out of a paramilitary camp is a remarkable one-er, but it's spoiled by pretentious camerawork where the viewer darts in and out of the Alain POV, and there's a lot of Bollywood-fight-scene-esque gratuitous slo-mo to show impact. It's got some astonishingly complex choreo, but the cinematography is too eccentric in that wannabe-artsy way that it's easy to loose track of the action. That scene is early on, so you could fast forward to that. Then bail. BAIL. You have been warned.

The rest of the movie moves from random fight to random fight, and the rest aren't nearly as good. There needed to be more Frank Grillo. Juju and Marrese lacked screen presence. 

The budget was $25M. They barely cleared $90K. 

Sword fights. Yup. This alien can shoot alien shuriken and has bloody-mary-style blades that spring from its wound-healing armor but it prefers swords. That's to its credit, I suppose. 

Not DOOM recommended.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Thank you for your service.

[Drunk Monk]

Den asked me if I’ve got an angle in on this and said they could probably get me an interviewee. Tempting if I can talk to Nic.

[Drunk Monk]

I rewatched that key fight scene. It's at the 20 min mark - a 2 min long take with a break followed by another 2 min long take. It's a well choreographed scene technically, but it's filmed poorly and the shifting in and out of POV didn't quite work for me.

So I declined the job. First job I've passed up since the pandemic. Feels weird. EDD always asks 'did you turn down any work?' but I'm not on EDD anymore, am I? 

But if you want to see it, skip to the 20 min mark - it's about 5 mins of your time. 

Then bail.


I also forget to mention that it has this odd comic book sensibility. The scenes are parsed by comic frames and it has that flipping comic page opening akin to the MCU.