Stars Russell Crowe, Cung Le, Lucy Liu, Byron Mann, RZA, Rick Yune, David Bautista, Jamie Chung. Directed by RZA, from his script with Eli Roth. Rated R. 96 minutes. Critic’s grade: C
Is “The Man With the Iron Fists” a bad movie, or a bad-good (or good-bad) movie? It’s election season, so I felt obligated to take an internal poll, measuring my own feelings on the subject. While 45% of internal respondents called it bad-good, so bad it’s kinda’ good, 55% called it plain bad. Nearly a split decision.
On the minus side, the film, hip-hop star RZA‘s directorial debut, a Quentin Tarantino-“presented” martial arts fantasy shot in Shanghai, is marked by choppy editing, convoluted storytelling, poorly developed characters, variously over- and under-cooked acting performances and often laughable dialogue, with some of the unintentionally funniest lines spoken by Russell Crowe. “Baby steps,” he says at one point, more than a bit anachronistically, in a film set in a dangerous, exotic place called Jungle Village, apparently in the China of the late 1800’s. Later, applying his, uh, understated sense of humor, he says, “I always take a gun to a knife fight.”
And what is R&B singer Mable John’s “lost” 1966 classic “Your Good Thing is About to End” doing on the soundtrack? So maybe that belongs on the plus column, alongside kung fu sequences that are occasionally well choreographed and decently photographed, sometimes intriguing art, costume and production design and — depending on a viewer’s stomach for this stuff — a wild array of brutal chopping, kicking, stabbing and decapitations. Blood spurts and flows, often in crazy fountains of the red stuff. Little wonder, I guess, given the involvement of torture porn king and Tarantino pal Eli Roth (the “Hostel” films).
The story’s MacGuffin, if you will, is a shipment of gold so valuable that it’s worth the sacrifice of thousands of lives. It’s really an excuse for RZA to gather a cast sure to appeal to international audiences, and fit them into various bad-guy and good-guy slots. Crowe, a sort-of mercenary fighter named Jack Knife (Jack the Ripper on holiday?) is in town to join forces with freed American slave Blacksmith (RZA), who specializes in unusually lethal weapons, and Zen Yi (Rick Yune, “The Fast and the Furious”), a super-fast combatant seeking to avenge the death of his father.
The three plan to launch an offensive against the likes of showy villain Silver Lion (Byron Mann, “Catwoman”), a glam rock-looking fellow who killed Zen Yi’s dad, his right-hand fight master Bronze Lion (Cung Le) and a scary, Hulk-like guy (WWE wrestler Dave Bautista) whose body parts turn to impenetrable brass when he gets really, really angry.
The mix of eccentrics also includes Lucy Liu as a beautiful, flirtatious and crafty madame whose loyalties may not be what they seem, and a pretty and (of course) good-hearted prostitute played by Jamie Chung (“Suckerpunch”). Given the blank-face readings offered by several actors, much of the cast apparently was required to spend time at the Keanu Reeves School of There-But-Not-There Acting.
RZA, reportedly inspired by the martial arts fare he absorbed growing up in New York, to his credit does keep the whole enterprise moving at a fast pace. There’s little time to think about how unevenly it’s all directed, edited and acted, or whether the story makes much sense. For the filmmakers, that’s probably a good thing.