Review DOA

Review: D.O.A.

When is someone finally going to make a videogame film that's anything more than mediocre? Not that this is anywhere near that good.

This is grade-a Bernard Matthews product. Its one saving grace is that it's well into so bad it's good territory. Oh! Did I say 'one saving grace'? Not quite true. The female cast are stunning and spend a great deal of time semi-naked. Which is just as well as there's bugger all else to pay attention to.

The plot is laughable, the dialogue execrable and the fights derivative to the point of being lifted from the likes of Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Apparently each of the fighters summoned to this "ultimate" competition is master of one fighting style. Jaime Pressley (Giving a performance completely indistinguishable from her turn in My Name is Earl), for example, is a wrestler. Apparently. Yet all of them, without exception, are clearly using the same eastern martial arts forms. And whichever skill they've mastered also gave them the same floaty, ninja-style gymnastic and climbing abilities as well as master-level swordsmanship.

I often found myself laughing at this film, but never at a point the writer would have intended. Especially if the scene featured Devon Aoki from Kill Bill. Dialogue featuring her always sounded like the kind of stilted overly-formal, literal translation you get in 70's chop-socky films or scholar-done versions of Ibsen or Chekov. Quite how a script that was written in English can end up sounding like it was translated one word at a time from a dictionary by someone with no comprehension of idiom or casual speech patterns I'll never fathom. No more than I will understand how any self-respecting actor could actually speak these lines as written.

As an out & out turkey there is some fun to be had from this film. Take half a dozen lads (preferably still undergoing puberty), copious amounts of beer and a couple of pizzas and you'd have the perfect audience for this film. Especially if they happen to be American frat-boys.

The underlying tone of misogyny, especially in the way all of these strong, independent women just have to get paired off with a matching male  (no matter what he's done to her or what a twat he is), leaves a nasty taste, though.

If Uwe Boll had directed this it would have an excuse. Corey Yuen, who helmed the excellent Transporter, has no such mitigation. Although it does explain much of the chop-socky dialogue…