Product: Michelle Yeoh Action Series [VHS]
Rating: 2.0
Hours of sheer boredom
Okay, so here's a question: When you sit down to watch a martial-arts movie, what do you hope to see? Crushingly long, drawn-out backstory explanations? Extended sequences of a heroine sitting around being catatonic? Inexplicable deaths of principal characters? Irritating, omnipresent moppets that the filmmakers obviously thought were adorable? No! You want kung-fu, and lots of it.But the makers of "The Executioners," the sequel to the martial-arts masterpiece "The Heroic Trio," have decided to buck your expectations by delivering a long, relatively pointless post-apocalyptic movie that can't seem to decide whether it's an action film or a political drama, and so flits mindlessly from genre to genre. The same heroines who spent the last movie flying through the air and beating the tar out of mutants now spend what seems like nine hours searching a dank, depressing blahscape for clean water and tolerating the antics of a gratingly "cute" small child.There are martial-arts sequences, from time to time, but these are few, far-between, and awkwardly filmed. Most of the violence in this film consists of anonymous soldiers running around and shooting people.The movie doesn't even make sense from a purely dramatic standpoint. The performances are either uninspired or over-the-top. The cinematography is amateurish. The movie's scenes seem to be organized without regard to any known conventions of storytelling. And its plot, such as it is, consists mostly of layers and layers of other, smaller plots which slowly wind their way along, going nowhere in particular, until they are suddenly forced together for a tacked-on climax.Those who are looking for more of the same action they saw in "The Heroic Trio" will be disappointed and, more importantly, bored out of their minds by "The Executioners."