Lucy Liu – Action Hero Movies

Upon seeing the stars, and seeing genre, and seeing how this movie won awards for being so bad, I couldn’t help but think critics must have been over-reacting. Maybe they’re not real action fans, I thought. Then I saw it for myself, or at least as much as I could tolerate. Not that I didn’t like the actors, or the genre, but it’s like one big acid trip. It’s like nobody’s doing thir job. It’s like everyone’s on something, and not really trying to make a good movie. I feel like I’m wasting my time watching this stuff. It’s so bad, I had to stop early. Very early. Like barely more than 20 minutes in. I skipped ahead to see if anything seemed to be improving, and it didn’t; so as much as I’m a huge fan of Antonio Banderas and Talisa Soto, and don’t mind a bit of Lucy Liu either, I simply couldn’t force myself to watch this tripe, it’s a waste of my life – well, most movies are, but this one particularly stands out in that regard.

Not that everything about this movie is bad, because there are some good attributes here and there. But the vast majority of the script, the acting, the sound, the integrated cinematography, the general atmospherics & momentum, the screen combat, and pretty much anything else I can think of, is like something you might expect from a college kids’ assignment. Minus a faint whiff of proper stuff here & there, particularly in how it’s packaged; it’s basically a B movie, and I don’t watch B movies. Well, it’s not a B movie per say, but it’s just as bad as one. I rate it Barely Watchable. That’s not to say you can’t watch it at all – it’s just to say I can’t watch it unless I’m utterly bored to the maximum. For once, I agree with the mainstream movie critics. It’s as if this movie was made as an April Fools prank. Roll up, roll up, there’s a respectable action movie here. Gotchya! Maybe some of the actors were pranked into being involved too. It really is that bad. Even the title is a mess – it sounds like it’s a sequel to something but it isn’t – it was just released to co-incide with the release of a computer game by the same name, which itself was a sequel to an earlier version of that game called (Ecks vs Sever). The game itself was a big hit for Game Boy Advance consoles, even if the movie itself is unanimously deemed one of the worst movies ever made in its genre at that budget level.

How on earth could it have a $70 million budget and end up like this? I guess it was generously sponsored to promote the game, then made in a hurry with cost cutting and money laundering.

Other action movies made in 2002 include Equilibrium and The Transporter – both awesome movies, on budgets of only $20 million and $21 million respectively. 2002 also saw the release of The Count of Monte Cristo which wasn’t so heavy on the action and didn’t have such big names but was a seiously captivating movie nevertheless, on a budget of $35 million. When you up the budget further, you get movies like The Scorpion King on $60 million starring The Rock, and The Bourne Identity on $60 million starring Matt Damon which spawned a massive 5-movie franchise.

There were also some super massive action movies in 2002, including Spider-Man and Star Wars: Episide II both boasting budgets in excess of $100 million. But $70 million is still a very serious budget so it’s quite shocking just how badly this movie turned out to be in practically every department.

Honestly, before looking it up, I was thinking maybe some spoilt rich kid was treated to the opportunity to direct a movie with such stars as Banderas, Liu and Soto involved. After looking it up, it turns out the reality isn’t terribly far from this theory. It was produced & directed by Wych Kaosayananda (under the alias Kaos) – he’s the son of a politican, who hadn’t directed any English movies before (only one Thai movie called Fah, 1998), and after this he took a 10 year break from the movie business altogether (to learn his craft perhaps?) but to his credit, he came back with some moderately respectable movies such as Tekken 2 (another computer game adaptation) which was a slight flop but was still more than watchable – I quite enjoyed it, as a former Tekken game enthusiast, even though it veered massively off-genre compared to the original Tekken movie and what would be expected of any film adaptation.

I have to say, this is a very weird movie. On the one hand it’s an eccentric satire of a kung fu come samurai flick, full of bastardised Laozi quotes, stinks of B movie vibes, and has the atmospherics of a kids’ cartoon; while on the other hand, it’s got stars like Russell Crowe, Dave Bautista and Lucy Liu, not to mention Cung Le, Rick Yune, Jamie Chung, Byron Mann, and RZA who also directed this movie and co-written it with the help of Eli Roth – a horror movie director who no doubt was somewhat responsible for the eccentric blood splattering that contributed to the weirdness of this movie.

For all these reasons, I can’t rate it any higher than Bang Average – I doubt anything in this weird genre can – but it’s also not any worse than average. Indeed, it’s probably as good as a movie can get in this weird slightly-eccentric slightly-satirical slightly B-movie type of oriental martial arts flick genre. It does a fair job of sustaining attention throughout, considering its shortcomings. I just want to know how the producers managed to convince the high level cast members – especially Russell Crowe – to get involved in such a B-movie level of production. In fairness, once they knew Crowe agreed, the rest were probably easy to convince, but how did they convince Crowe to stoop to these levels? He could have probably hired a better production team with his own money and not noticed anything missing from his fortune, so why waste his time on this tripe? I have no idea.

Sequel

It should come as no surprise that Crowe did not return for the sequel in 2015, which went direct to video. But they did manage to get Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa involved, and Rick Yune came back, plus of course RZA, although he didn’t direct the sequel – that job went to Roel Reiné this time – but RZA did co-write it again, with the help of John Jarrell this time round.

The quality of The Man With The Iron Fists 2 (2015) is a couple of levels down from that of the original. It has practically no special effects – just a bit of slow motion at times, and it has very little cast power too. It has a few mildly watchable parts but they’re too few & far between, and mostly too late in the movie – I had to skip through the vast majority of this movie while looking for anything watchable so I have to say the movie overall is generally unwatchable by my standards. For more than the first half of the movie, it’s pretty much solid boring drama. The last half hour or so is barely watchable, but on a better level than the prior hour.