Hardly a film

Rating: 1/10 (16 October 2003)

Frequently boring, extremely disjointed, and way too self-congratulatory. My biggest personal pet peeve was that it was very noncinematic in its heavy use of voiceover narration, on-screen titles, and speechifying by characters. I like film to convey points of plot and character and mood and attitude through imagery and action... that's what the medium excels at, no? To have these points conveyed through narration and bad dialogue is inexcusable to me. As for the vaunted action sequences... yes, they are well done, but I found myself wanting to go home and watch all of a Leone western, or a early-70's Japanese pop-Samurai film, or "Battle Royale," or one of my favorite HK action flicks, rather than Tarantino's far-too-short pastiches of same. I so desperately want this film to bomb at the box office. If this travesty spawns imitators, I'm packing it in and bidding farewell to multiplex cinema. On a positive note, Uma was enjoyable in the lead and Lucy Liu made a fine villainess. It was great to see Sonny Chiba on the big screen, also.