This is a hard movie for me to review. It's hard to explain how something with so many good elements can also be such a bad movie. There was so much about this movie I liked. I found the style to be very interesting. It took a lot of 1970s martial arts movie style and mixed it with rap music. It was very Samurai Shamploo in that regard. It also had an interesting film noir feel to with with the narration early on in the film. Then of course you had the awesome kung fu elements tied in with wire fu scenes and more than a hint of Tarantino-esque gratuitous violence.
The problem is that it didn't offer much more than style over substance. And the style got old real quick.
If I were to go see it again and counted all the fountains of blood spray, I'm sure the tally would hit double digits before the half hour mark. It's just too much. The fight scenes are really well done but after the first few beheadings I just think to myself, "here we go again."
RZA is a decent enough supporting actor. But I'm not sure he's good enough to carry a movie as the leading man. It's clear he took a lot of tips from Tarantino as far as directing, but the editing was not as clean as it needed to be and the story wasn't nearly as tightly told as it should be.
Maybe I should explain. Silver Lion kills his boss Gold Lion just before they are about to take a job protecting a shipment of the Emperor's gold. Silver Lion wants it so he kills Gold Lion and takes over the Lion clan. And then we get into why he wanted Gold Lion's son X-Blade killed. X-Blade wants to avenge his father's death but he really doesn't even know who killed his father. As far as he knows it was Poison Dagger.
And that gets into Russel Crowe's character Jack Knife. Who went to Jungle Village for some reason. And stayed there for some reason. And wants to fight Poison Dagger for some reason. And Silver Lion hires Brass Body (David Bautista) to kill X-Blade because X-Blade might take over the Lion clan and Silver Lion is the leader because he killed Gold Lion and blamed it on the Wolf clan. And the Lion clan is going to go to war with the Wolf clan and at the same time going to kill the Gemini Killers and steal the Emperor's gold that they were hired to safeguard (I think). All the while there's a brothel full of ninja prostitutes in town and the most beautiful of the prostitutes is in love with the blacksmith (RZA) who gets his arms chopped off by Brass Body because he helped X-Blade. And then he and his friends make a pair of iron arms for him so he can fight Brass Body.
This is what I mean! This story is all over the place! Like I said, it had a lot of elements I liked, but the movie as a whole just doesn't work.
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