MaverikRogue Assassin - It's War On The Streets
August 6th 2008 01:46
If there's one thing I can't stand about films... Then I wouldn't be a very good critic. However, there is something that this particular film does that really rides on my nerves... When someone decides that it would be a good idea to give a movie more than one title, and depending on where in the world you are situated will depend on which version you are treated to. It's a small niggling little thing I know, but it makes finding that film an annoying task if you happened to end up with the less popular of the two titles. And seeing as I need to access these sorts of things myself in order to give you all the best detailed review I can, it makes my job just that little bit harder. So thank you Lionsgate. Thank you for annoying me before the film even started. Just so you know, since it was the version I watched, I shall be referring to the movie as Rouge Assassin from here on out.
Now, I spent the better part of my morning watching this film. And two words sum it up nicely... Jason Statham. Have you ever seen Transporter 1 or 2? Crank? How about Chaos? Their defining and connecting features? They all star Jason Statham, and he plays almost exactly the same character in all of them. And Rouge Assassin is no different. After having seen both The Forbidden Kingdom and Rogue Assassin, I'm noticing that Jet Li is starting to act as more of a supporting character in his newer films, always playing to the style of the actor's he is working with, and seldom bringing his own bag of tricks to the set. It doesn't feel so much like he's leaching off their talent, as it feels almost like he's afraid that they will leach off his. It's almost interesting enough to warrant going and seeing this film, if only to witness this strange phenomenon.
If you're waiting for him to flip out and do something awesome, you'll be waiting most of the movie...
Well I'm 2 paragraphs in and I haven't started talking about the movie itself... So let's cut the crap and get this train wreck a rollin. Rogue Assassin follows the exploits of FBI agent Jack Crawford (Jason Statham) as he tries to hunt down the ever elusive expert Yakuza assassin who goes only by the name Rouge (Jet Li). Things are kicked off after his partner, Tom Lone (Terry Chen), and Tom's family are murdered by the infamous Rouge, a man they thought they had killed. Jack finds Rouge's signature weapon at the scene of the crime... Bullets with titanium shells & depleted uranium slugs. Three years pass before Rouge re-emerges, and the chase is on, while Rouge himself has a hidden agenda of his own, pushing all the right buttons on both the Yakuza and the Triads.
The movie's fairly mediocre. A lot of it has been done before and usually done better. Statham's character is the same one we always see, and his story is straight out of a movie making hand book. Good cop looses his partner, buries himself in his work, thus loosing his family and leaving him to focus only on his target. Thank god they didn't also add a subplot about him refusing a new partner, or I would have had to condemn the movie right there. All the other police characters are bland and under developed, leaving me to have no real reason to care when any one of them catches a stray bullet and dies dramatically. Though it seems that director Philip Atwell realized this, because none of the films characters seem to care either.
Most of the character development strangely enough seems to go to the films villains, although their motives are never really explored. They get more screen time than anyone else (aside perhaps Li and Statham), but they never really do anything with that time. They essentially just set the scene that they are the leaders of the Yakuza and the Triads, and they're both trying to get their hands on some golden horses for no reason deemed interesting enough to be given an explanation. This reads fairly weakly to me, but hey, I already knew that I wasn't watching golden cinema by this point.
It's Jason Statham just... Doing what he does...
The only really likable character is the entire film is the Triad boss's daughter, who has all of 5 lines in the film, but is the only one introduced who didn't then give sour looks, sound irritable, or in general be unpleasant to someone else. Tom Lone's family also get an honorable mention for not living long enough to be unpleasant.
The Verdict: If you absolutely love everything Jason Statham, including a ton of action sequences, a mandatory chase sequence every 10 minutes, and at least one woman randomly undressing for no apparent reason and then leaving the room, than this is the film for you. If however, you'd rather a little more sustenance than this, I recommend you look elsewhere. Whilst the end twist is unexpected, it hardly makes up for an entire movie of mediocrity.
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