![]() ![]() Here the film aims for some fish out of water humour but the scenes with her breakdancing at a mall or turning up dressed hip (where apparently Uriah Shelton, despite he and his mother struggling to pay the mortgage, can afford to outfit her out of his own pocket at one of the high-end fashion boutiques at Vancouver’s Metrotown mall) feel exactly like middle-aged men trying to strike a teen vibe without having a clue what teenagers consider cool. Some of the worst scenes are the ones where princess Ni Ni comes through into the contemporary world. The Warriors Gate is an appallingly bad film, even more so than The Forbidden Kingdom was. Modern videogamer Uriah Shelton and pricness Ni Ni on the run from warriorsīesson and co have clearly not seen that The Forbidden Kingdom was regarded as a critical disaster due to the very reasons that they readily replicate here – the focusing of a martial arts film around a badly out of place white kid (and cast with an actor who has no skill in martial arts) the appropriation of the Hong Kong/Chinese tradition of the martial arts film by people who are incompetent at staging combat scenes with any of the elan that the directors working in the original Shaw Brothers fad and their modern successors do and the need to pitch everything so that the film can be ‘gotten’ by modern teenage kids. That and maybe a few dashes from The Last Starfighter (1984) in which a kid who is a videogame junkie is transported into the middle of a real war, being mistaken for a great warrior because of his skill. With The Warriors Gate, Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen have done nothing more than rehash The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), the disastrously tone-deaf attempt to appropriate/homage the Shaw Brothers martial arts film and Hong Kong Wu Xia cinema of the 1980s. It is also quite possibly the worst example of any of these attempts to pander to the Chinese box-office. The Warriors Gate is clearly another attempt to appeal to the Chinese market, being made as a Chinese co-production, being partially shot in China and featuring a number of Chinese actors in key roles. The last few years have seen Hollywood and other filmmakers eager to court the increasingly lucrative Chinese box-office to the extent of shooting on location in China and casting names that have collateral at the Chinese box-office. Besson has handed the director’s chair to German director Matthias Hoene who previously made the zombie comedy Cockneys vs Zombies (2012). Besson co-produces and co-writes the film with Robert Mark Kamen, the writer of the original The Karate Kid (1984) and Gladiator (2000), as well as number of Besson directed and produced scripts including The Fifth Element, The Transporter (2002), Taken (2008) and sequels, and Colombiana (2011). ![]() ![]() The Warriors Gate was a film from Luc Besson, the French director of films like Nikita (1990), The Professional/Leon (1994), The Fifth Element (1997), Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) and producer of dozens of others in the last decade including the Taken and The Transporter franchises. ![]()
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