It's not every day I see a movie without ever having seen a single trailer for it. Moreover, even though it had been out only two days, Street Fighter: the Legend of Chun Li had been panned into oblivion by the time I got to the Regal Solomon Pond on Saturday after to catch this. Somehow it wasn't booked in Leominster or Tyngsboro. I guess they figured they didn't want to waste auditorium space on it.
Kristin Kreuk---well, I used to be a Smallville fan of sorts, so I wanted to give her a break. At first it was excruciating to watch her, in particular whenever she did a voice over.
But the movie settled into a rhythm and I began to enjoy it. Neal McDonough always makes a fine villain, but tell me, if his parents abadoned him in the Bangkok slums when he was an infant, how did he still wind up with a thick Irish brogue?
The movie was at its worst when it was trying to be an adaptation of the video game upon which it is based. The girl gets an ancient Chinese scroll as an anonymous gift. She takes it to a dealer in the alleyways of Hong Kong, who reads two lines of it and says, "You must go to Bangkok."
Really? That's it? It took an ancient scroll to say that? But no doubt this particular MacGuffin is something that the game players have seen before, so it must make its appearance. In movie terms, it was just silly.
But like I said, I actually began to like it a little, even with the bad acting and slopping direction. The martial arts scenes were actually a bit watchable, and the whole episode in which the heroine "goes under" (untergehen, in the Nietzschean sense) by living hand-to-mouth on the streets of Bangkok was somehow compelling, even though it was rather unnecessary to the story.
Let me summarize the story paradigms (since this is what I spent most of the movie doing anyway):
1. A young girl witnesses a horrible crime perpetrated against her father by dark forces. When she grows up, she hunts down the evil mastermind and gets revenge.
2. She is martial artist, but her talent is raw. After suffering setbacks, she meets a master who shows her how to hone her skills (by releasing her anger, of course) until she is ready for the showdown.
3. A male and female cop develop an erotic attachment to each other while chasing the bad guys.
4. An evil globalized corporation terrorizes the slum dwellers of a Third World metropolis, using a private security force to kill those who get in its way. The police are overwhelmed at first, but through determination and luck, they get the upper hand.
Number four in the above list was actually quite fresh, very 2009, and was the reason this movie was somewhat entertaining. I can forgive a lot of things about a movie when it has these kinds of themes.
Now for the cliche list. Besides the aforementioned martial arts-related stuff, the most obvious ones were:
1. A busty and leggy female cop hunts down the bad guys while wearing leather and riding a motorcycle.
2. All other things being equal, the protagonist is also an accomplished concert musician who solos on stage with a symphony orchestra.
Number one is plausible and almost necessary, given the story paradigms. But number two just made me groan when I saw it. There should be a ban on this one.
Like I said, the globalization thing won me over. The cinematography of Bangkok was surprisingly interesting for this kind of movie. Perhaps the most disappointing thing was the climax, when the heroine finally kills the bad guy. Following the recent trends, she executes him while he is helpless, preferring to pass judgment on him even though the cops are right around the corner.
As I've said, we no longer trust the State to provide justice to us. There is too much corruption, even when one of the big bad guys goes down.
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