A Wannabe

Rating: Null/10 (3 May 2003)

God knows I hate to do it, but I have to agree with the critics on this one. Roger Ebert had it right (for once) when he said,"too much action brings the movie to a dead standstill." It starts off well, but I zoned out about a quarter of the way through and was relieved when it was over.

While beautifully filmed, as has been said, this movie has little plot coherance and much of the action lacks believability. We are never allowed to know who the characters are or their motivations and frankly, don't care one way or another about them.
Plus, the editing sucks big time. Erratic "cuts and pastes" serve to pull the viewer out and add to the distraction. Not to mention the strong accents and lack of english subtitles for some of the dialogue. The only guys speaking clearly haven't much to say. (Don't get me wrong, I speak a couple of languages (asian and european) and have international experience, "foreigness" is not an issue. But here it's a major distraction.)

Even the special features were a disappointment. The extended fight scenes were unedited and we saw the wires.
On the plus side, there is an awesome soundtrack, good humor, beautifiul locations, cool car, generally good fight scenes and Jason Statham without a shirt is nice to look at. The commentaries were rather interesting, especially those of Jason and his point of view as a fighter.

OVERALL, a B- movie, filmed as if it were an A one.