The Warriors Way Review

[Westside Steve]

The Warriors Way

Relative Media

R 100min

 

The week after Thanksgiving is a traditionally slow week in the movie business. Maybe everybody’s too busy participating in a six AM brawl over a two hundred dollar flat screen at the local Walmart but about the only things that sell tickets are the ones where you can drop off the kids while you shop or whatever you do when they aren’t around.

This year, possibly just to mess with my deadline, only on new flick came out and just to mess with me it was a martial arts film.

That’s not to say that all martial arts films suck, but lets be fair, most of them do.

And like the little girl with the curl when they are bad they are horrid.

Among the essentials of any martial arts film are a handsome Asian warrior who never smiles (unless it’s Jackie Chan) a wise old master plenty of surreal scenery and a plot just a little thinner than a video game.

That’s what I expected with THE WARRIORS WAY and that’s what I got.

Jang Dong-Gun stars as Yang (I’m not kidding), the world’s greatest warrior. Because he has committed an act of mercy, he’s exiled to a weird little town built around a ramshackle circus in the American west. Here the citizens go about their daily lives dressed in the regalia of clowns, fire-eaters jugglers and all manner of sideshow personnel. Actually that outlandish scenery is one of the very few things worth watching here.

This “Chop Suey” western bears no small resemblance to Eastwood’s HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER complete with some despicable marauders a revenge hook and even a ringmaster midget.

In the grand western tradition of BLAZING SADDLES (minus the humor) Yang will unite the damsel in distress and the other citizens to take on the bad guys.

Don’t worry, though, if you love bloody violent karate and swordplay all performed in slow motion, as well as plenty of really bad acting, you’re in luck.

 

D+

WSS

 

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