The Warrior's Way is this week's most ridiculous trailer

The upside is, every so often, a work of art comes along that is so innovative it changes the whole paradigm of its media, bearing a tangible influence on everything that follows. The downside is, most of what follows is a pale imitator -- like how every movie with an...

By Jef Otte

December 3, 2010

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The upside is, every so often, a work of art comes along that is so innovative it changes the whole paradigm of its media, bearing a tangible influence on everything that follows. The downside is, most of what follows is a pale imitator -- like how every movie with an Asian in it since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Drago has to have flying-ass ninjas, or how everything since The Matrix gets the old bullets-in-super-slow-motion treatment, or how every western since Sergio Leone traffics in the same stone-faced-badasses-looking-for-redemption archetypes. Or, in the case of The Warrior's Way, all three.

Probably the coolest thing this movie's got going for it is the ninjas that keep bursting out of the ground all slow-mo -- but if that trick pops up three times in the two-minute trailer alone, you can be pretty positive that it's going to lose its luster by the 90-minute mark. Other than that, this movie appears to be a melting-pot of stuff we've already seen time and time again: The stylized ninja flick, the chosen-assassin flick, the chosen-assassin-ninja-flick-combined-with-the-western-flick (I'm pretty sure Jackie Chan's been in a couple of those, actually). This stuff is pretty much old-hat, and it doesn't help much to spice it up with a soundtrack of starting-and-stopping-every-two-seconds-for-a-one-liner nu-metal schlock.

And how about those one-liners, amiright? "Ninjas. Damn." Thanks, old cowboy typecast guy, those were pretty much my thoughts exactly.

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