The Warrior’s Way (2010)

It’s almost poetic that The Warrior’s Way hits screens the week after Thanksgiving. After all, it is a casserole of not-so-fresh cinematic ingredients. Here’s a handy recipe. Mix equal parts Once Upon a Time in the West and Ninja Assassin. Sprinkle liberally with 300 and The Karate Kid. Serve on a bed of Carnivale. Let that simmer in your brain for a moment.

Handsome Korean actor Dong-gun Jang plays Yang, who has been trained all his life to be an assassin for his clan, the Sad Flutes. He is on the verge of completing his life’s mission of becoming “The Greatest Swordsman in the History of the World – Ever” (a screen title announces to the audience) by wiping out the last of a rival clan. But he can’t bring himself to slaughter the opposition’s sole survivor, a gurgling infant girl. His refusal to finish what he started skyrockets him to the top of his own clan’s hit list. So he picks up the girl like a sack of potatoes and goes West, young man.

First, he seals his sword so that his fellow ninjas can’t hear its siren call and track him to his new home. He lands in a dusty desert town in the Old West, populated by circus folk the likes of Lynne (Kate Bosworth), an Annie Oakley-style tomboy whose entire family has been murdered by a deranged, over-sexed Colonel (Danny Huston) and Ron (Geoffrey Rush), the cartoonish town drunk. Yang assumes the role of the town laundryman and when he’s not hanging the whites out to dry, he trains Lynne in the ways of the ninja for her inevitable reunion with the Colonel. She is still unprepared when the moment comes, which forces Yang to unseal his sword to save her. And thus, the scene is set for a showdown between the carnies, the Colonel’s Winchester-shooting cavalry, and a seemingly endless supply of black-clad ninjas.

It’s clear from the opening scene of The Warrior’s Way to its closing credits that newcomer director Sngmoo Lee has seen a lot of movies (and most likely read a few graphic novels). His fantastical Western backdrop and silent stranger-hero borrows heavily from the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. Similarly, his use of de-saturated color on all but the reddest blood, the pinkest cherry blossom, and the yellowest desert rose is taken right out of film adaptations of Frank Miller books like 300 and Sin City. But Lee’s iteration of these does the opposite of what the now-ubiquitous 3D technology aims to do. His is a murky oil painting of a two-dimensional scene with cardboard occupants.

That could have all added up to an interesting commentary if Lee’s imitative stew hadn’t also incorporated Wachowski-esque slow motion and 360-degree camera angles. Those techniques that were so groundbreaking when The Matrix premiered in 1999 have become easy shorthand for action and, in the case of The Warrior’s Way, a lazy substitute for good fight choreography. Lee overuses the gimmicks so that the audience ends up seeing the striations on at least three different hurtling projectiles. What is this, Wanted?

At least that film was buoyed by the considerable talents of James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie. In this case, Jang is all stoic looks and silence. At first, I thought it had to do with his inability to speak English but then quickly realized it’s the script, also written by Lee, that’s challenged. A dearth of good dialogue leaves Bosworth flushed and flustered most of the time and Rush to reprise his Pirates of the Caribbean schtick. Only Huston is able to take a line like “A hard-on for a scar. That’s kind of wrong,” and turn it into something deliciously evil.

There are moments in the film that are enjoyable. For example, when the CG army of ninjas leaps off the roofs of buildings like so many flying squirrels, it’s a thing of hyper-stylized beauty. But Lee is silly to have set himself up to be compared to some of the most recognizable filmmakers in history. If The Warrior’s Way is his weapon, then the poor guy has brought a knife to a gunfight.