Greetings
valued Dan's Movie Report and www.action-flix.com
readers. Today I take one for the team after obtaining Invincible
Dragon. After so much promotion on this film during production from
various action sites including my own site, I had to watch. The film
released in China theatrically on July 2nd
and to home market in Asia August 30th.
Rather
than going on a long rant and rave about this film, I am keeping the
review rather short. Essentially The Invincible Dragon begins as a basic
crime drama as women police officers are killed. Actually the initial
story is decent, there is some character development, hotheaded cop,
concerned boss, etc..., yet the film never manages to allow the
audience to care about the characters enough.
Anderson
Silva is of course a legendary MMA fighter and all around great guy,
but to have him as a lead in his first film is a bit rough, his line
delivery is very understated and a bit wooden, that said, he is no
worse than many of the secondary characters in the film.
Actresses
Stephy Tang and Annie Liu give the film some sex appeal and are
decent, yet again they are just side characters in most of the
production, save for a few lines. Stephy Tang can act, and has talent
she really needed more of a meaty role.
Director
Fruit Chan, who is actually quite talented obviously did not have
final control of the edit of this film as during the last 30 minutes
things go haywire literally and makes zero sense. For the first hour
the film is decent, then it tails off due to a long song that
basically contains a montage of things that happened in the past,
where it should have either opened the film or no song and just went
into a story. Finally, a ridiculous ending with very horrid CGI, that
made no sense, yeah so we have the boy with the dragon tattoo hah!!
Except Zhang's dragon is um, not just an expression.
A few
bright spots are JuJu Chan, she plays the wife of Anderson Silva in
the film, she is mysterious and turns out to be a cool villain and
has the best fight in the film with Zhang Jin, on a train, with what
looks to be scaffolding. Sadly the bad train CGI interspersed with
the fight lessened the impact a bit.
Zhang
Jin is amazing as an action actor, I really enjoy his work. He did
his best with the source material, yet some of the action and fights
did not have the urgency they should have and the final fight with
Anderson Silva is way too long, yep I said it, needed to be
shortened. The reason being, it was not epic, had too much
interspersed stoppage time, and it seems like posing for the next
move rather than a real fight to the death.
Lighting,
camera work is good in the non action sequences as Fruit Chan is a
master at drama, that said, I did not care for the camera angles
during the fight sequences, either the camera was far to close or the
angles did not allow the audience to see the action.
Overall,
I really wanted to like this film, as I respect Fruit Chan and many
of the actors in it, sadly I cannot recommend Invincible Dragon at
all, and as a rating perhaps, being kind as I feel today, is a 4 out
of 10. If the film eventually finds it's way to Netflix and you like
action, watch it for JuJu's fight scene and some of the other action, but
otherwise The Invincible Dragon is a forgettable film that will probably
deserve to fade away.
