The Warrior's Way review

Walking into movie without much to go upon except a couple of trailers and posters is probably what I love doing the most. Let's face it movies today get spoiled months in advance due to the online world, but once in a while there's a film falls through the cracks in certain respects. One that not enough people have any interest in to comment on the happenings surrounding it. Sometimes it's a movie like "Skyline" in which no one had much to run on outside of the brothers Strause comments about the studio system. Then opening weekend we discovered the movie was absolute shit. And then there is "The Warrior's Way". The trailers almost scream movie made for the meme generation. Slack-jawed, morons without a shred of intelligence or good taste that love to make poor jokes about zombies, ninjas or whatever else is "popular" at the given second. Well it still might kind of be that movie... but it's an absurd amount of fun.

Viewing "The Warrior's Way" can only be compared to the first time I watched something like "Dead Alive" or "Darkman". For the first ten to twenty minutes I questioned what the hell this was and then something happens that makes me fall for it. With "Dead Alive" it zombie killing, kung-fu fighting priest. In "Darkman" it was the lab assault that creates him. In this it's Danny goddamn Huston. Huston plays Colonel, a scar-faced bastard who loves raw steak, fucking with the townsfolk and rape. He loves himself some rape. It's a character role for an impressive actor where seriousness and good taste get to fly out the window and he's let go to do whatever he wants. But he's not alone. As soon as Kate Bosworth opens her mouth and starts rattling off in an over the top, but likely southern jaw it's great. You start to love her goofiness in all fashions. And Geoffrey Rush as a drunken rifleman is as exciting and humorous to say the least. Really the moment in which our hero played by Dong-gun Jang reaches the deconstructed western town is when the film really seems to come alive.

The plot is something of a mixture of generalized eastern and western stories. On one end is the wayward swordsmen who grew a heart and turned his back on his master. On the other is quirky western towns people that gets roughed up by a band of marauders as they just try and skate by in life. Apparently mixing these two elements and having them exist in a cheapened "300" like universe works. And I use the "300" thing lightly. Despite the green screen environment several of the gorgeous horizons don't appear to be CGI, but simply real skies super imposed onto the screen. Also the cheap effects work wonders for the feel of the movie. It starts to feel like something made with the same love and sense of experimentation as old school Jackson or Raimi. Okay that's a big thing to say, but see it and then compare it with some of their older films and see if you can't find the same heart.

I mention the off feeling I had at the beginning of the movie, but by the end it all makes sense. The opening seems like it's aiming to be something less than it could be. It feels like a video game and the violence is too fast and shows very little for an R-rated film. By the end I understood why. It's not a gore-hound film, but it is violent. I realized that had they shown since the opening the style in which they really fight it would have grown stale and dull by the big climax. They employ an interesting type of slow motion fighting that doesn't feel like the Snyder-slo mo we've been seeing as of late. It's faster and more fluid. The action set pieces are also quite fun to watch and cleverly put together. Again they are cheap, but that cheapness WORKS. You don't need sixty million dollars to make a fun and original genre movie and "The Warrior's Way" proves that.