GOD OF WAR REVIEW MOVIE
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Even Qi's soldiers, some of whom are portrayed as drunken embarrassments, ultimately prove themselves in battle.Īgain, a nationalistic action movie is not necessarily an impossible-to-swallow premise. So is Qi's wife, who is simultaneously a capable soldier, but also a nag who gets upset at her husband for showing up late for dinner. The lead pirate, an aspiring ronin who fights with honor, is too noble to be dislike. Every character is treated with the utmost reverence. There's a brittle, airless quality to its dialogue. But 'God of War' is not the film to sell it. There's nothing theoretically wrong with an action movie that tries to make you appreciate the lengths that its characters go to before they get to fighting. Realistically, the all-talk-and-precious-little-action approach that the makers of 'God of War' adopted could have worked. This is how you overcompensate for such an otherwise lame, and pointedly bloodless movie? There's so much expository dialogue in this film that I practically yelled at the screen when I saw how much blood the filmmakers used during fight scenes. Blocky dialogue scenes frequently serve to explain the many reasons why Qi was stymied by the Ming officials and soldiers that needed him most. We're talking about a movie that features an otherwise enjoyable battle sequence that prematurely concludes with an inter-title that assures us that most Japanese pirates died during the skirmish than Chinese soldiers did. And things keep happening that have nothing to do with this movie's most exciting elements. And he yells at his men for being drunk while off-duty. After that, he tries to have a reasonable conversation with the people responsible for locking up his predecessor. Then he's yelled at for not capturing the Japanese pirates, which in turn leads Wu to being imprisoned. Then he tries to get the approval to train the army.

GOD OF WAR REVIEW SERIES

But for the most part, Qi's story is related through a series of conversations about everything but pirates.

There are a scattered handful of preliminary scenes where we see why Qi is such a big deal, like the one where he and Wu fight one-on-one in a prison cell, or the one where he outfoxes the pirates, and forces them to retreat. So the higher-ups in the Ming dynasty regime ask Qi to do what Wu doesn't have the tactical skill to do: kill 'em all. Qi is tasked with replacing/aiding less-successful Chinese Commander Yu (Hung), a well-regarded leader who keeps relentlessly attacking (but never succeeds in annihilating) a group of entrenched pirates. General Qi is a strategist, so he spends much of his time wading through red tape that prevents him from training soldiers, and defeating Japanese invaders.

Oh, that's right, because 'God of War' feels like a stillborn attempt to do for General Qi what action star Donnie Yen and the 'Ip Man' series did for its title character, Bruce Lee's real-life teacher. Seriously, what's doing with these samurai pirates, and why are they not the stars of this picture?

God of war review