Gorgeous to the eyes; deadly to the ears & mind.

Rating: 7/10 (26 April 2004)

Photography and art direction are Oscar-calibre. However, we were checking our watches during several talky scenes, especially when David Carradine was droning on. And. On. In. His. Very. Portentous. And. Halting. Way. And what has happened to Michael Parks? He was such a cutie in his younger years, and now he's a character actor playing a dried-up 80-year-old pimp. However, it must be acknowledged that he gives a gem of a performance.
On the plus side, it's not as bloody or gory as I feared (I didn't see KB-1) due to the comic-book style. At times this comic-bookness seemed like a cop-out, providing an easy out for things like, how can someone get shot point blank with a double barrel shotgun and not have to deal with a cavern in their chest -- or at the very least the embedded buckshot. Clearly, the director is so in love with the images and the IDEA of the film, that he loses the plot and structure of the actual film we are watching. I mean, really, how many people were clamoring for an homage to martial arts films? And how many really needed a sequel to the homage? I got the point after 20 minutes - I really didn't enrich my life with another 2 hours of the same parody.