Well, I was bound to love it. Hot asian samurai babes, what more could a straight guy want?
Ahem... anyhow... took me a while, but I grabbed the DVD cheap off CD-Wow with a coupon last week. I'd been waiting ages to see this, as I never got around to seeing it on the silver screen for some reason.
What a killer flick. Real cinema. The whole Rourke bit was stunning, really really damn fine action... the acting chops was impressive on all of them, even when the films script veered into noir corniness. It's the kind of visual orgasm that really gets the professional in me excited about new cinema techniques, except unlike the rather plodding Casshern and the horrendously acted Sky Captain, it marries its digital imagery with a winding snake of a narrative, explosive (literally) punchbag violence and snappy dialogue with more deep-throated men than a cheap '70's porn orgy.
A friend told me people walked out of the cinema he was in as they felt sick watching it. Chickens! There was really nothing that could elicit that kind of repsonse in a person... heheh... merely for the very clever way it was handled. I mean, it's pretty f*cking gruesome. But it also marries it to disconcertingly sympathetic characters. Clive Owen's character is the least likeable, but the addition of a reason to care for them makes all the difference to the movie being about crunching violence and playing on each characters individual psychosis and worldview.
I'll never look at Elijah Wood the same way either. One of the more compellingly sinister screen killers for a long time, if only for his complete lack of personality. He's so totally cold that he doesn't even come across as human.
Anyhow, if you haven't seen it, do so. It's like someone taking a sledgehammer to your eyes before reaching a rusty wire into your earholes and twisting slowly.
Well, not quite. But I'm sure one of the characters would oblige if you gave them a reason.
