If you're as old as I am, you may remember British boy band Bros, who enjoyed a brief period of success in the late 1980s. Band member Luke Goss has since moved on to acting. For my money, he's better at this gig than he ever was at music, but his on-screen career has tended toward ... well, it's tended toward movies like this one.
Actually, that may not be entirely fair. This is by far the worst movie I've seen Goss in; and I've seen Tekken. But he's definitely tended toward the shallow end of the cinematic gene pool, with his highest profile parts being as the antagonists in Blade II and Hellboy II.
This film, though ... wow. It doesn't just waste Goss's talents (and he is a pretty charismatic actor, really), but the talents of pretty much everyone who gets in front of the camera. There's a fair number of capable-if-far-from-A-list actors in this flick, but none of them can make the dialogue work, and I don't blame them for that, because its straight out of a 14-year-old's first attempt at a fantasy novel. Leaden and pompous only begins to describe its problems.
The narrative is as clumsy and malformed as the dialogue, with characters lurching in and out of the story like badly-operated marionettes. Perhaps the worst example of this issue are a group of Chinese bandits who attack Goss's character, then join up with him, and later get pretty unceremoniously killed off because the script doesn't need their martial arts mojo any more.
The story? Oh yeah, Goss is the heir to the throne of a kingdom beset by witches. When his father dies, he has to fight to defend his people against the supernatural menace that threatens them. This feels like it takes a lot longer than the film's 82 minute run time. The end.
Seriously, you'd be better off watching Tekken.
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