Hot War
10/31/00
Review
Format: VCD
Stars: I don't know and I don't care, just a bunch of new wave people

Blue, Tango and C.S. are CIA research scientists working on Project VR Fighter which is designed to train unskilled person (sic.) into magnificent combat agent. Tango and C.S. decide to undergo the training themselves, because Alien, the international terrorist, has killed C.S.'s fiancee and kidnapped Blue for his conspiracy. Alien is finally destroyed, however, the side effects of Project VR Fighter lead to the war between the two friends...

Now that's intersting (no sarcasm). Project VR Fighter is a plot that can open to, uh, around six billion doors, maybe four of which are bad ones. One of the bad ones makes a movie that is just a love story. Another door makes it into a drama about friends. Another brings us to sleezy action with lots of fast cuts and a camera that forgot to take its Ritalin. And the other bad door is a combination of the other 3. The other six billion minus four lead to the possibility that a person goes into this VR unit, learns different styles, and fights with those styles, many of which are defined and called out, and yet another way to do it is to learn JUST ONE STYLE, and have competing styles... I'm talking out of a sour mouth right now, but I'll just say up front that this movie chose the 4th bad door (the other 3 doors combined). Let me explain.

Skip the story ahead to about the 25 minute mark and the 2 guys (C.S. and Tango) start learning their fighting skills, which are all undefined. What you see first is a computer image of Tango with another guy who seems to be much faster and more agile, and all Tango does is do some real world moves on him. Knockdown, he gets back up and attacks again. It's like they're being trained for each movement. Well, the stuff is completely undercranked. Don't try and make me believe that what I'm seeing is regular speed. Secondly, Tango does the same stuff to the guy over and over, so yea I kept an eye on exactly what was happening and what moves the other guy was doing, and they just repeat and get more and more undercranked. Then C.S. does the same thing, and it's just some more moves that he suppresses. Sure, they look as though they can actually be done, except for a few where they totally fling the completely yielding opponent off to the side by grabbing his leg or something, but so far this wasn't fight choreography to me and I didn't see anything that could relate later on. And then they have a first person boxing match with multiple opponents, and you can't really see much except for some wireframe stuff.



C.S. and Tango get into a gunfight in an office building about 10 minutes down the road, big deal. Some moves thrown in here and there, like Tango throwing a guy onto the ground and kicking him (hmm...). C.S. takes a guy's arm and holds it and hits him in the stomach and renders him useless, which seems a little unrealistic, almost to the point of The Matrix. He also clotheslines a guy. Alien, who I assumed was THE formidable foe, runs off.



C.S. is on a little wooden thingie in the bay and some jet skis are going all over the place, and so is the camera. He shoots at some of them, the cuts are like every 2 seconds, and then a woman runs her jet ski up onto the thingie (DOCK, it's a dock!) dock and he clotheslines her and she lands on the dock, a setup for a fight, and cut to the next scene... what? Well it comes back 2 minutes later as a flashback, and here's what happens. Sweep (can't see it), jump, drop, closeup on a smiling, no-talent chick throwing 2 punches, side shot with C.S. blocking twice, shot of him doing an ugly kick, she elbows him (closeup, looks like an LSD flashback), 3 punches badly thrown (a different closeup), he grabs her arm (shaky camera, closeup again), grabs her hair (yet another closeup), and she falls down as though he's throwing her and he spins afterwords (a shaky shot), and then he stabs her. Stupid. Why bother? No sound effects either, since it's a flashback.



So C.S. is in trouble, and in an airport terminal he gets in a fight with some CIA guys, and all they do is brawl, while Tango is handcuffed to a chair that was never bolted to the ground the way it should have been, so he picks it up. All of it is done to some ballad music with some wimpy sound effects, and you can't hear ONE guy do some kind of yell or anything. A weak performance. Later C.S. and Tango fight in an abandoned orphanage, and they exchange some, um, holds, and they punch through a glass pained door at eachother, do another hold that is basically lost due to shit camera work yet again, and C.S. runs off. They meet up again and after about 20 cuts there have been maybe 6 moves. Then it's over.



The last fight is painfully long. First, a shootout in some kind of camera station that is totally cramped and badly suited for the action that takes place. Then Alien, some Chinese guy with blonde hair (they show him with short black hair and he looks so much more respectable, I wonder why he did something like that), comes and shows C.S. what real fighting is, supposedly. He puts him in a headlock for a long time (great), and he does moves that are supposed to be real and are supposed to work, but all they do is have him do something within like 2% of the actual move, cut, and then show the second half as a closeup. Some decent choreography comes after Tango comes in, but it's ruined again by way too many cuts and camera angles that make it look like a wrestling match. Plus, Alien looks to be faking everything he does. It's not impressive. Alien and C.S. end up near a swimming pool on the top of a skyscraper (they used some flying machines like what Jackie used in Armour of God 2), and brawl with no good choreograpy to speak of. Alien falls off the top to his death. The end.



So I learned something VERY valuable from this movie. Here's what happened. In the beginning, it was getting hyped up to be about smart fighting and precision gunplay, the latter I don't and didn't care about but I could manage watching it. It had lots of choreography (a whole 30 seconds or so) in the beginning that was totally absent from the content later on, so what I was looking for was something that they basically promised me, yet I didn't receive it. Instead what I got was stuff that wasn't really introduced in the beginning, and this didn't seem to comply with the rules that the movie had already set aside. Bad BAD camera angles, music that drove me nuts, not enough sound from the characters, everything was blue for some reason, as though they were trying to set some kind of mood which clearly didn't help, there were these annoying nuances by the editor like fading into cuts during dialog, or the shaky camera used almost all the time like they used in Gladiator or Saving Private Ryan, which only promotes sickness and not realism because when I'm in some kind of danger, I don't see things like that, in fact I doubt anyone does. And too many cuts, dammit. They need to lighten up... but they won't, of course. "This is the next generation, guys, and we need to make it more intense!" Yea, well take that intense and stick it up your @$$!

1/5 - For realism like the few joint locks and occasional throws that looked possible.

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