War

War (2007)

Runtime: 103 minutes

Directed by: Philip G. Atwell

Starring: Jason Statham, Jet Li, John Lone, Devon Aoki, Mathew St. Patrick

From: Lionsgate

This is one of two review for me today. I'll post the other one tonight. I first saw this movie in like '08 and I didn't think it was that bad until the terrible ending. I saw this again a few nights ago on Instant and well, it IS bad throughout with a terrible ending. I explain why I feel this way now in my Letterboxd review below:

War... what is it good for? (Almost) absolutely nothing, in this movie's case.

For a long while now whenever I saw people on messageboards or otherwise discuss this film I'd say that it wasn't that bad until the ending, which I always said was a big failure. That one time I saw this movie was like 7 years ago so I actually did not remember too much about it in 2015; when I saw it was on Netflix Instant, I figured I needed to give it another spin.

Turns out, this movie is as not good throughout as everyone said it was, and the ending is still pretty rancid. The tale is about a pair of FBI agents and one of them is murdered by a mysterious assassin named Rogue, which was going to be this movie's title but then the Australian killer crocodile movie came out around the same time so they changed it to War. Three years later, we see Crawford (Ol' Stubblehead Statham) is in the FBI's Asian Crime Task Force, centered in San Francisco. From there, we get... a whole lot of nonsense, basically. There's a feud between the Triads and the Yakuza over a pair of golden horse statutes. Yes, there's meaning to them but when spelled out like that, sounds rather silly. But that's not the worst of this movie's sins, not in the least bit.

The movie is filled with tired eye-rolling cliches (the incompetent cops that deal with the Asian Crime Task Force are SO stupid) and things that just made me sigh out loud. There are familiar faces between Statham and Li (Luiz Guzman, John Lone, Sung Kang, Kane Kosugi, Saul Rubinek) but it doesn't really matter with this bad story. Devon Aoki... no offense to that lady but it's probably a good thing she hasn't acted in years, as she isn't that good at it.

But at least I can get down to brass tacks when it comes to THE main problem with this movie: it tries SO hard to be “hip” and “cool”. It's shot and directed in a flashy way but it's mainly distracting and I wished for those dumb flourishes to go away as this should have been a more simple meat and potatoes story; I would have been content with that. Then there's that ending... a few times the movie tries to be “clever” by fooling the audience and you find out there's been some misdirection that's going on. The biggest example happens during the ending.

Now, the advertising implied that you'd get a big showdown between Statham and Li. Even if that wouldn't have happened most people probably would have assumed that's what we'd get if they looked into what the film was about. The ending should have been "a big climatic duel for the ages." What we got what was pretty much a brief skirmish then an information dump and the realization that the movie played a big shell game with us. I won't go into details in case anyone still wants to see this, although I recommend that you don't. I mean, this is a game of three-card Monte not worth playing. The finale just frustrates you as it was not needed at all, you felt like you were conned and you wasted your time watching this nonsense.

I would like to apologize for those on the Internet that heard me say in the past that this movie wasn't THAT bad; you were right and I was wrong. At least I know never to be tricked by that motion picture again.