War is Raw

Last night my friends and I went and saw War. I guess its actually a Jet Li movie, but I love Jason Statham and so to me it was a Statham movie. Actually I had never heard of the movie until I saw a poster for it at a bus stop on my way home from work one day; I saw a 4 foot high Statham head and thought 'oh yeah, we're seeing this' without even knowing what it was about.

Anyway, back to the movie itself. It may actually have been a good movie, but I didn't enjoy it. I draw a distinction between movies that are good (in terms of good film making) and movies that I enjoy. To me the plot was hard to follow, and the twists didn't seen to work for me. Well, there were two twists, one worked ok the other didn't at least for me.

There was excessive violence. I don't get instantly bothered by violence in a movie (it is a movie after all) but I don't like the graphic bullets to the head and the unseen murder of small children. There was some nudity in the film that clearly wasn't needed. At one point a woman wearing a revealing evening dress brings Jet Li a suitcase full of money and then disrobes, compliments of whichever guy we thought he was working for at the moment. What was that all about? There was some minor nudity and sex in the almost mandatory movie club scene. Maybe those were integral to the plot in showing the nastiness gang life - who knows? I'm no film critic.

After the movie my friend and I both independently remarked that what the movie was sorely missing was Statham taking off his shirt (ala Transporter). I'm only partly joking. If that had somehow been included in the movie it might have made up a little for the $9.25 ticket.

Oh well, next time I'll just have to pop the Transporter DVD into the player to get my fill of shirtless oil fighting.