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Anti-Rec: War
Sep. 26th, 2010 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aris_tgdWar is one of those movies you're not quite sure how anyone could screw up. It stars Jet Li and Jason Statham, and they fight. How can you get that wrong? A certain percentage of the population wants to see Jet Li and Jason Statham in a movie where they beat each other up, and here it is! We present it to you!
And yet.
War is not a good movie. It's a disappointingly poorly plotted movie for several reasons I'll outline below, and on top of that it suffers from the same kind of systemic racism that most big-budget Hollywood movies do. Which is a shame, because it's star-billing one of China's greatest martial arts stars of the last thirty years, and it has a cast full of Asian and Asian-American actors. If it were a better movie, it would feel refreshing to see a movie more or less about the tense relations of two crime organizations in San Francisco, both operating across the Pacific Ocean; as it stands, it just feels like the titular war between the Triads and the Yakuza is just background for Statham's White Guy Man Pain.
( Spoilers below the fold. )
And yet.
War is not a good movie. It's a disappointingly poorly plotted movie for several reasons I'll outline below, and on top of that it suffers from the same kind of systemic racism that most big-budget Hollywood movies do. Which is a shame, because it's star-billing one of China's greatest martial arts stars of the last thirty years, and it has a cast full of Asian and Asian-American actors. If it were a better movie, it would feel refreshing to see a movie more or less about the tense relations of two crime organizations in San Francisco, both operating across the Pacific Ocean; as it stands, it just feels like the titular war between the Triads and the Yakuza is just background for Statham's White Guy Man Pain.
( Spoilers below the fold. )