Warrior‘s Way took over 2 years after it finally find a home in theaters.
I wasn’t expecting much from this movie. First of all martial arts movie The Warrior’s Way in no way similar to a Red Sun film, which featured the rogue cowboy, Charles Bronson, and a rogue samurai, Toshiro Mifune, even guns and swords blended together here too.
Director Sngmoo Lee decided don’t stay in reality and work with his fantasy, eventually we have got a live-action anime. During all film I was tasting like I missed something. Even non-stop action and slow-motion of The Warrior’s never given the chance to feel for what’s really happening.
It’s a fable told by a narrator about Yang, the ultimate assassin, who is wanting to become the best swordsman. But when all rivals killed he is faced with killing a baby, the last member of rival clan, but can’t do it. Here life long killer decides to hang up the sword “for a new life” and takes the child and goes on the run.
He hides in a nearly ghost town in Wild Wild West sending his own clan after him over the ocean. He makes his new home in a small desert troubled town populated by kind hearted circus folk, and becomes a laundry owner. Of course his past finds him, and you get plenty of cowboy verses ninja action.
The action sequences in the martial arts movie Warriors Way are very well done, there is a lot of slow-mo slashing but as always in similar films, the victors of the battles are predictable. Quick cuts, fast action, reality without rules and ninjas look good for anime, but there is no great story, everything is simple. I love the look of ninjas, their fighting style and even ninja leader looks respectfully but something wrong.
Yang played by another South Korean actor Jang Dong-gun (read about Jay Chou as Kato in Green Hornet Movie), you probably saw Jang in Kaige Chen’s The Promise movie, in 2005, a story where empowered by the love of a slave , a royal concubine is given the chance to make an extraordinary decision.
But what I can’t understand why Danny Huston, Kate Bosworth and Geoffrey Rush are here? They are Hollywood talents and definetely wasting their time on the sets of this movie, script doesn’t give him a chance to star.
Jang Dong-gun as deadly as he is few of words, similar to Rain in Ninja Assassin, but that’s only one resemblance. Try do not cry when you will see how ninja Eskimo is killing a man with a frozen fish stuck in his eye.
If you have not seen Kim Ji-woon’s The Good, The Bad, The Weird with a superb mix of guns, bandits, and samurais, so go and watch it, it deserve your time more than this movie. Or you can watch Reign of Assassins Movie.
For this time Warriors Way grossed $3,775,000 Worldwide and most of all in Opening Weekend – $3,048,665. Production Budget is $42 million.
