"The rule of cool" is not a good enough excuse for this.

Rating: 1/10 (6 May 2010)

"The rule of cool" is what this entire movie lives on. But it does not work. No. Because there is no suspension of disbelief. This movie p***ed me off because it was constantly insulting my intelligence with a straight face. The plot and the characters are completely random and non-nonsensical. "Oh, he's just saying that", I bet you're thinking. Which is why in the following there are Spoilers (can hardly call it that though, since none of it has any significance to what you would call a story).
So what is so random? How about exploding rats and magical baths that cure any wounds instantly. Having increased blood-flow will give you lightning reflexes and godlike stamina, despite the fact that you have lived your entire life as a shy accountant. Becoming a master assassin is simple, just let strange people abuse you for a while. A main character that goes to any length to avenge the death of a father he has never known in his entire life, twice. Yeah and spying on someone, never letting yourself be known or do anything at all to intervene with their life, shows you care. Also you should kill people you know nothing about, simply because someone tells you their name. Making a train derail on a bridge, killing hundreds of innocents is justified, in order to kill one man who is opposing an organization of assassins who operate by the rules of a cult. If you suddenly hit your office co-worker hard enough to punch out their teeth they will obviously think you are "the man". The list goes on.
There are as many plot holes as action sequences (ie. a lot) and every action sequence completely disregards the laws of physics, for no apparent reason. This is only attempted to be explained once by "your heart beats faster then a regular human, therefore you can shoot the wings of a fly." Literally. But even if you can swallow that, this only applies to two people in the movie, yet everyone apparently has blatant superhuman abilities. Laws of nature does not apply as long as people die. What? No. No movie, just no. Bad movie!
As the movie progressed I cared less and less about the characters or what was going on. None of it made any sense. After a while I was just waiting for the pink elephants to marsh in playing their trombones.
The action itself should at least be cool, but it's all completely ridiculous. The movie can not even pull of a decent exiting scene because I just could not buy into any off it. "Gun Kata" galore, the art of automatically knowing where everyone is so you don't even need to see them to shoot them. And guns that dead people drop just conveniently fall into your hands if you are bad-ass enough. Shooting with a gun that has an object stuck in the barrel makes it backfire! Writers, read a ****ing book! Even Street Fighter the movie was fun because you could at least get a good laugh out of it. This is just mind numbing.
A weaving machine produces a weave that a secret organization translates into binary code, getting ASCII letters that spell out the names of people who have to die. Why? Because fate says so...
How are you supposed to be able to take that seriously. A five year old on drugs would not blurt out something like that. And from there it just gets worse... Yet the movie seems to take itself dead serious. This is not satire. If you believe enough, you can shoot bullets in arcs around objects and hit targets... NO! You can't just do random stuff for absolutely no reason at all. It does not matter how good your CGI effects are. It's still entirely pointless. Writing random words on bullets that fly by is not clever. It's abuse of rendering power that the CGI department could be using to make something worthwhile.
I wish I could unsee this movie. A movie that has Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie. They alone should be able to make the movie at least watchable. Just goes to show that no matter how much money you pour into a worthless script and a director that only cares about special effects, it will not produce gold.