This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Action, NEW ON VIDEO, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Director: Philip G. Atwell
Starring: Jason Statham, Jet Li, John Lone, Devon Aoki, Luis Guzman, Saul Rubinek, Ryo Ishibashi, Sung Kang, Terry Chen,
War is a BS action flick, just like a thousand before it, and worst than most them. The job of taking this poorly written script that was probably written on the back of a cocktail napkin long after happy hour had vanished into an alcoholic haze. Seriously, the dialog is embarrassingly bad and the characters are cardboard cutouts that you’ve see in most of those previous 1,000 action movies and even the character actors blow lines like coke addicts at a Hollywood house party. Some of the action scenes are good, but there isn’t even enough of that to keep your mind off how bad the rest of this flick is.
Jason Statham is FBI agent, Jack Crawford, whose partner, Tom (John Lone) is killed by the mysterious assassin with the comic book name, Rogue (Jet Li). Jack’s life becomes consumed by his thirst for revenge. What a clever and original opening! Soon he is the middle of a gang war between the Yakuza and the Triads, most of whom seem unable to lay their hands on guns and fight randomly with clubs, like its 10,000 bc., or something. There is a pretty good sword fight and some other decent action, but not enough to make this one worth it. There isn’t much to say about the ending except that even most action fans hated it.
War is a waste of time for all but the most die hard (speaking of great action movies) Jet Li and action fans. Li has made a lot of better films than this and Jason Statham continues to be typecast in junky slo-mo action orgies after his promising start in Snatch. This like Face Off meets Black Rain, and if you liked those films (both of which were at least a little better than this), then this might be worth renting, but only if Shoot ‘em Up is not on the shelf.
