The Tournament

Rating: 4/5

A film designed for Marcey, that is what The Tournament felt like! Action packed, bloody, cool cast of characters, silly and over the top, as if I was going to hate this one! The Tournament is just that, it is held every seven years, in a regular town with the worlds deadliest assassins. What do they have to do? Kill each other of course, until there is one left who is the winner and claims the cash prize. Oh it is nothing new really, this kind of thing has been done before, however I just had so much fun with this film!

It has a great cast, we have Robert Carlyle as a Priest who gets pulled into this mess, and he is really good however he usually is and he is a reliable actor. The beautiful Kelly Hu (X2's Lady Deathstrike) plays Lei Lei Zhen, one of the top contenders to win the tournament. Ving Rhames as the previous winner Joshua who is out for revenge against the assassin who murdered his wife. Ian Somerhalder (Yes Boone from Lost and The Vampire Diaries) as psychotic Miles Slade, he just does not care and he is bad ass. Keep an eye our for Scott Adkins too as Yuri Petrov. There are other characters and most of them are throw aways and you know that going in, it is a film about assassins killing each other after all. They all delivered the goods in my humble opinion, Ian Somerhalder being a stand out and I thought he was fantastic. Kelly Hu has some awesome moves and I liked her and she had a good little chemistry with Carlyle too. Ving Rhames is bad ass and his character ended up being sympathetic, he was after the person who killed his wife. He doesn't know who killed her just that the person is in the tournament and there are a few little twists along the way.

Story wise it is rather weak and they tried to tweak it by adding the wife murder plot and putting in the unsuspecting priest. It has been done before, and all in different ways (Battle Royale, Running Man, The Condemned ect) and I liked that they used actual assassins for this, making them rather bad ass and ensuring some awesome fight scenes and it has a lot of blood, it is gorey and that suited this sick puppy just fine. Sometimes I just need to sit down to film that does not require much thinking, wall to wall action and some cool characters. This is my idea of relaxing and it worked so well, and I think it would be awesome if a Tournament II was made putting all the action stars against each other (J.A. Hamilton had that idea in a column of his last year). I am sure there are people out there who thought this sucked and it was stupid but it isn't meant to be serious. It isn't a long film either and it is paced quite well and it flows perfectly. This is how I like my action served up, thank you director Scott Mann.