Michelle Mazlin

Bored this weekend, flicking through endless subscription TV I found this intriguingly named movie. Why name a movie after a martial art? I had to know. And, as a lover of bad action movies, and sucked in by the Nic Cage name drop I figured it would be my cup of tea. How wrong I was. Confounded by the (lack of) story line, boring fight scenes and the weird 1st to 3rd person camera switches I paused at 42 minutes (take that all you 30 minute quitters) to google the movie. I wondered if the writer/director was also the main actor. He clearly couldn’t act, but really seemed to be into Jiu Jitsu, so I figured he and his mates also in the movie had somehow drummed up enough money to buy Nic Cage and bring their love for martial arts to the masses. Apparently I was wrong, apparently some of these ‘actors’ are actual actors that other people (not me) know. And also apparently IT’S NOT EVEN JIU JUTSU!!! The travesty. And what’s the deal with the first person camera scenes? I thought it was 1st person, then Jake suddenly runs into scene from behind the 1st person camera?! Is he having an out of body experience? Not sure. As for the Nic Cage contribution? I’m not knocking him. I mean, why not? He clearly enjoyed himself, he was funny, and could actually act. He must have filmed this in between takes of The History of Swear Words. Like others, I found the most enjoyable part of this movie was reading the reviews.