10-26-2022, 10:11 PM
(10-24-2022, 10:13 PM)Drunk Monk Wrote: Blade of the 47 Ronin
This looks horrible. I must watch it.
Yup. Horrible. I can't even begin to describe how horrible.
It tries to be cool - tries too hard. Every single line falls flat. Every. Single. Line. ouch.
I can't remember Keanu's 47 Ronin that well (my reminder is here http://www.brotherhoodofdoom.com/doomFor...6#pid18806) but I didn't feel that this was even remotely connected.
Set in Budapest - modern day or slightly in the future (it starts looking very Bladerunner but then quickly abandons those CGI effects, probably spent it on digital blood instead). Whenever it is, people can walk about in samurai garb carrying swords and no one bats an eye. There are samurai, witches and ninja. There's a sword that was split in half - one for the samurai and one for the witches - and an evil from the past will get awesome power if he can reunite them. Only a descendant of the 47 Ronin can defeat him. Got it? That's established in the first few minutes. The rest is fight scenes, parsed by little bits of horribly flat dialogue.
At the half hour mark, I checked the time to make sure I hadn't stepped into some 3 hour Tollywood flick. It's saving grace is that it comes in under an hour fifteen.
The upside is there are sword fights. Lots of sword fights. They fight the ninja horde which allows the same stunt people to get killed again and again. There's a high body count. A drinking game based on the kills would floor any of us in our drinking prime in the first half hour. The fight choreo is okay. It has a few good moments. There's an okay train fight, a nice decapitation or two, as well as a cheesy digital split down the middle and a few almost inventive moments, but nothing that fresh for a film that hinges on the fight scenes.
But oh so bad. The lighting guy is like a bad 80s flashback. So many green and red lights for no reason at all. The costumes are slapped together as if the cast just dug stuff out of their closets.
Not D00M recommended. Not at all. Not for our fellow swordspeople, who love sword fights. Not for those of us who love bad cinema because this isn't bad enough. Not even for Greg who could surely rant endlessly on how horrible this film is.
Instead of jumping on this grenade, I feel like I belly-flopped on a pile of seppuku wakizashi arranged like the base of a yucca plant and was spun around like a lemon in a manual juicer.
Shadow boxing the apocalypse