When I watch, either in the cinema or at home (as I did this one), a truly awful movie I get up and do something a little more useful. Such as watch paint dry.
This baffling, pretentious, infantile effort was so bad it was almost watchable - just for the masochistic feelings it provoked.
I commend whoever wrote the plot synopsis for IMDb - so far as I was concerned there was no plot worth talking about from the beginning to the end. Gratuitous violence, yes. SlowMo fights, yes. Blood - lots of it, yes - even though it was pretty fake. Did I mention gratuitous violence? That too.
But plot? Not to my mind, no.
A plot, to be interesting, has to have a beginning, middle and end. That's not to say that it has to be predictable: far from it. But the threads have to hang together and, in some way, come together to round off the experience. "The art of war" only has a myriad of characters, locations, broken glass, mobile calls and long drawn-out aerial views of New York to substitute for a even remotely logical story. (Did I mention gratuitous v..... yes, I think I did.)
Sutherland is, as usual,Sutherland. The director probably intended his brogue to be an analogue of a Canadian accent. It isn't.
Anne Archer intones her lines as if she's just caught sight of the script (*was* there a script??) and can't really believe she will be paid for reciting them.
Snipes does the best he can with a woeful screenplay, takes an awful lot of punishment, absorbs a bucketful of lead in exchange for about the same amount of (fake - *really* fake) blood and comes back from the dead for the sequel. (That's not a spoiler, BTW - it's about the only obvious scene in the movie.)
A stunningly bad example of how destroying cars, buildings, glass walls and, of course, people, isn't anything like enough to make a grown-up movie.
1 / 10 but only because zero isn't an option.
Edited 4th Feb 2011. I have just re-read my review above and realise that I cannot remember anything at all about this film! Not the plot, the scenes or the characters. After a couple of months. There must be a clue here!
This baffling, pretentious, infantile effort was so bad it was almost watchable - just for the masochistic feelings it provoked.
I commend whoever wrote the plot synopsis for IMDb - so far as I was concerned there was no plot worth talking about from the beginning to the end. Gratuitous violence, yes. SlowMo fights, yes. Blood - lots of it, yes - even though it was pretty fake. Did I mention gratuitous violence? That too.
But plot? Not to my mind, no.
A plot, to be interesting, has to have a beginning, middle and end. That's not to say that it has to be predictable: far from it. But the threads have to hang together and, in some way, come together to round off the experience. "The art of war" only has a myriad of characters, locations, broken glass, mobile calls and long drawn-out aerial views of New York to substitute for a even remotely logical story. (Did I mention gratuitous v..... yes, I think I did.)
Sutherland is, as usual,Sutherland. The director probably intended his brogue to be an analogue of a Canadian accent. It isn't.
Anne Archer intones her lines as if she's just caught sight of the script (*was* there a script??) and can't really believe she will be paid for reciting them.
Snipes does the best he can with a woeful screenplay, takes an awful lot of punishment, absorbs a bucketful of lead in exchange for about the same amount of (fake - *really* fake) blood and comes back from the dead for the sequel. (That's not a spoiler, BTW - it's about the only obvious scene in the movie.)
A stunningly bad example of how destroying cars, buildings, glass walls and, of course, people, isn't anything like enough to make a grown-up movie.
1 / 10 but only because zero isn't an option.
Edited 4th Feb 2011. I have just re-read my review above and realise that I cannot remember anything at all about this film! Not the plot, the scenes or the characters. After a couple of months. There must be a clue here!