The Warriors Way (Relativity Media)
Its Way Out There
The Warriors Way is a wild, wild west adventure that features an Asian warrior who travels with a baby girl. Now if that isnt odd enough for you, he settles in a town that is mostly inhabited by members of a circus freak show. It all comes across like some type of Sergio Leone Italian western on steroids.
Yang (Jang Dong-gun) is one of the greatest warriors the world has ever known. He has killed all of members of the tribe of his sworn enemies, except for the lone survivor. This is a baby girl named April and Yang can not find it in his heart to kill her. Since he knows his own tribe will demand her death he leaves his homeland and travels to America and the Western frontier.
When he reaches the small town where a friend from his past has been living he learns this man is dead. Yang decides to stay and takes up the friends trade as a laundryman. .The town has a run down circus at the back and most of the inhabitants of the town are circus performers. One of the few women in the town is a girl named Lynne (Kate Bosworth).
Lynnes parents and little brother were killed by a man known as The Colonel (Danny Huston). He thought he had killed Lynne but she survived. Now she waits for the time when she can take her revenge.
There is a love story of sorts and a lot of action sequences but the movie never makes much of its plot. And the ending well forget the ending. You will get the maximum enjoyment out of the movie if you just concentrate on the action sequences.
Dong-gun is a fairly good actor and he has all the action moves down to perfection. Bosworth tries to create a real character out of Lynne but her fake sounding southern drawl makes the girl a caricature of herself. Huston is great at playing the villain and this movie gives him a chance to growl and snarl. Geoffrey Rush plays the town drunk and I dont know why. He is too good an actor to be seen in a movie like this one. Maybe he owed someone a favor.
The movie is rated R for profanity and violence.
Taking a samurai movie and smashing it with a gunfight in the old west just doesnt work. One is best seen in slow motion and the other needs quick draw effects. Maybe Jackie Chan could have pulled this off but not an unknown like Jang Dong-gun. The audience leaves this movie feeling confused, confounded and totally worn out. You can throw in stupefied also.
I scored The Warriors Way a well traveled 4 out of 10.
