Rating: B-
Director: Jesse V. Johnson
Stars: Tony Jaa, Iko Uwais, Scott Adkins, Celina Jade
This offers a truly stellar list of martial-artists. Indeed, I’m hard pushed to think of a better cast since the “Three Musketeers” of Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung were collaborating. Beyond the above names, the film also includes Michael Jai White, Tiger Chen, Jeeja Yanin and Michael Bisping, most of whom are capable of carrying a film on their own. And that may be part of the problem here. By trying to cram too much into this, inevitably, some are not going to get their just deserts. Poor Yanin felt like the biggest victim there, though her exit from the film was undeniably spectacular. But this also takes away from the main characters, who should be the focus of the movie more than they are. The net result is something which is good, yet still counts as a disappointment.
The story sees Payu (Jaa), Jaka (Uwais) and Long Fen (Chen) going up against Collins (Adkins) and his crew, because… reasons. It’s not very important. All you really need to know, is that Collins is seeking to kill Xiao Xian (Jade), because of the threat she and her inherited wealth poses to organized crime in the fictional city of Maha Jaya. Payu and his pals are out to protect her. At this point, the wrestling fan in me will point out this scenario is less a Triple Threat, which would involve three separate entities, and more like a six-man tag, heiress on a pole match. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Anyway, as such, it offers no shortage of opportunities for the requisite amount of mayhem, especially as one of the home team has embedded themselves as a mole inside the opposition. However, it’s not the 95 minutes of hardcore hand-to-hand action I wanted to see. Every word of explanation about how upset Jaka was about the death of his wife, the pause so we can discover one of the heroes culinary skills, the clunky second-language acting required from our heroes, and every generic bullet fired from an automatic weapon, felt like a waste of both time and opportunity.
Do not take the above to mean this is, by any objective standard, bad. Even the stuff we’ve seen a million times before, is reasonably well assembled and shot. And there’s no arguing, it’s worth sticking around for the final battle in the abandoned building, when things truly kick off. There, it says a lot about Adkins’s prowess that he ends up fighting Jaa and Uwais simultaneously, and manages to look pretty credible doing so. However, the fact that the movie has taken an hour to give him anything appropriate to his talents, may help explain my general lack of whelm (over or under). I was entertained, make no mistake about it. But I was not blown away, as I was hoping to be, with the concept proving to be several notches better than the execution.
This review is part of Project Adkins, covering the movies of Scott Adkins.