Jiu Jitsu - Movie Review
What do you get when a television producer who’s obsessed with martial arts decides he’s now a writer / director and somehow raises enough money to assemble an incredible cast of action stars, but then forgets that movies are supposed to tell a story and be entertaining?
Let’s discuss.
I’m going to save everyone a lot of time here. Don’t see this movie. I don’t care if it’s free and you’ve got nothing going on in your life. This diseased tumor of a movie lacks any entertainment value.It has musical and story “beats” , but has none of the build-up or story craft to make them anything other than excuses for slow motion. The film is the emotional equivalent of drying paint. It’s as if a producer wanted to craft a film based on a nine-year-old’s action figure narrative.
Brutal, I know.
I’m trying to keep these punches above the belt, but I can’t help it.
They brought this grundle annihilation on themselves.
Jiu Jitsu is a 2020 action / sci-fi film brought to us by writer / director Dimitri Logothetis. Don’t know the name? Good, much like Voldemort, let us not speak it any further. If you absolutely need a backstory on this film criminal, just know that he’s the one responsible for the straight to streaming sequels to Kickboxer. We’re talking swirling the porcelain throne level of career here and yet somehow he raised enough money for this travesty.
The film, which is an extremely generous descriptor, tries to focus on Jake, played by stunt-man Alain Moussi. He’s a generic white guy protagonist who is suffering from stereotypical action movie amnesia. He’s arrested by a secret US military team spying on the Burmese military, but before they can try to jog his memory, they’re attacked by Ong Bak in a hipster hoodie who secrets Jake away to a poorly rendered, CGI Mortal Kombat temple. There Jake is told that he’s the chosen one, go figure, and he’s gotta stop an alien warrior who gifted humanity with Jiu Jitsu. This alien comes back every 60 years to challenge 9 warriors to honorable combat. The 9 warriors can die in battle and the alien will leave or they can try to defeat him and die and he’ll leave, or they can cheat and the alien will kill everyone, or they can not fight and the alien will kill everyone. I’m not joking, this is the actual story as told by a completely checked out Nick Cage. Seriously, it’s hard to make Nick Cage not invested, but these filmmakers pulled it off.
I can’t even continue the synopsis ya’ll.
This movie shares the rare sewer air of such turds as House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and Postal. Yeah, it’s in the terrifying depths of the Uwe Boll trench.
What’s frustrating is that the film has an amazing cast. It’s got Tony Jaa, Frank Grillo, Nicolas Cage, and my favorite badass femme fatale—Juju Chan Szeto. These are good actors and outside of Cage, fantastic martial artists. The fact that non-actor Moussi is given the lead makes zero sense, outside of the fact that he’s best buddies with the writer/director. He can’t act. I don’t mean he’s bad. I mean he literally is incapable of emotion. The fact that they made Juju Chan have to play at being in love with him is egregious. She throws everything she has at him and he just stands there like a wooden board. Frank Grillo would be the obvious choice to play the lead, seeing as he’s a talented actor who fronted the awesome HULU original, Boss Level recently. I have an inkling that Frank got on a set, saw the shit show, and called his agent, because his character is killed off super early.
He noped the fuck outta there.
There’s about 35 minutes spent on Marie Avgeropoulos’ character of Myra and her military team, but then they just vanish. Some of them die, but Myra just fucking disappears halfway through the movie. She was set-up as the love interest, but then she just disappears and Juju Chan is forced to slide into that role. It’s as if they shot a 60 minute feature and then had to go back and shoot the US military stuff to pad out the runtime.
Then there’s the special effects. The alien looks like a cast-off practical effect from the original Power Rangers. It’s a rubber suit with a terrible iMovie cgi face and it’s obvious the filmmakers saw Predator as we see through the heat vision of the creature and it goes “invisible.” It also runs at super speed like the flash, regenerates like Wolverine, and sword fights like the fucking Highlander. It looks like shit, moves like shit, let’s just be real—it’s shit.
There’s nothing good to say about this film other than for the miracle the casting director pulled off.
Please.
For the love of God…
Don’t watch this movie.
If you want supernatural martial arts, watch Wu Assassin on Netflix starring my girl Juju Chan.
I’m not telling you where this warcrime is streaming. If you want to commit this atrocity on yourself, you’ll have to do the heavy lifting too.
