Triple Threat

Wery untapped potential. Entrusting the biggest martial arts stars of our time to an ordinary routine artist was a bad move. This should have been made by someone of Asian descent, no doubt. That the story is ordinary is to be expected, but that it would be so uninteresting and unentertaining, and also, everyone speaks English, which tore my ears off and only adds to the already bad acting. Another big problem is that everyone is running around with guns – they shouldn't have used anything other than hands, feet and knives. There aren’t many fights and, apart from the finale, the rest are hardly worth mentioning and no one will be coming back to them. The most interesting fight is probably the one between Tony Jaa and Scott Adkins; it has some challenging choreography, but it barely lasted two minutes, which isn’t enough even the fastest orgasm. It's good enough for a better average, but I was expecting either funnier or at least more intense stuff. Looks like I'll have to wait for the next Tjahjanto, who was the only one who understood that without violence, ordinary fights don't faze anyone anymore. 60%. (03/24/2019)

Only a malevolent saboteur or hopeless amateur could turn an all-star action film into an exercise in missed opportunities. Unfortunately, Jesse V. Johnson has written himself into the memory of martial-arts film fans as an incompetent who buried the film that was supposed to be the most spectacular hit of the new millennium. Furthermore, it actually could have been just such a hit because, unlike the geriatric and senile The Expendables, this film brings together the biggest names and strongest talents of the West and Far East who are martial-arts practitioners themselves. If this had been put into the hands of someone who knew how to shoot fight sequences, such as Isaac Florentine, let alone Chad Stahelski, it would have been adrenaline nirvana. Johnson, however, completely wastes both the skills of his actors and the work of the chief choreographer when he incomprehensibly sets the film’s climax in the dark and focuses more on his backlighting gimmick than on the attraction of the martial arts on display and the pairing of the stars against each other. Furthermore, here and in other scenes, he holds the camera too close, so that the skills of those involved and the dimensions of the scene cannot make a sufficient impression. (04/05/2020)