An Absurd Movie ... Unleashed

Given a choice of Wedding Crashers, Monster-in-Law, Kicking and Screaming, Lords of Dogtown, and Unleashed (a.k.a. Danny the Dog), I chose the least of all the evils. It's still a bad choice. Very bad choice.

Who would've thought that with Luc Besson as director, Yuen Wo-Ping as martial arts choreographer, Jet Li and Morgan Freeman as main characters, and Massive Attack providing the soundtrack, we'll still end up with a bad movie like this?! Compared to The One, Romeo Must Die, and Kiss of the Dragon, there's way less fight scenes in Unleashed. I'm all for quality-not-quantity, but we're all better off watching Jet Li's old kungfu movies. That was before he had crazy ambitions of conquering Hollywood. I've watched lots of his Shaolin movies and Once Upon a Time in China series, and his moves are just awesome.

The fight scenes in this movie are too unrealistic. People don't line up to attack you. They don't wait for their turn to get their butts kicked. And there's only so much beating a person can take before they go down. Even the drama aspect of the movie is badly developed. Morgan Freeman is good as always, but I guess it's not enough to inspire his fellow actors. Not sure what happened to Jet Li here, but his acting is downright pathetic. His character is supposed to be psychologically abused and illiterate, but that's no excuse to carry a single facial expression throughout the film. He was poker-faced in Hero, but his emotions still show through. As for Victoria, who is supposed to be 18 years old, living with a blind man and playing the piano all day long must've influenced her mental and emotional development in a bad way. No 18-year old girl is as carefree/happy/innocent as her.

Total waste of time. I should've just watched Sin City again.