- Title: The Warrior’s Way
- IMDB: link
Dong-gun Jang stars as the world’s most dangerous swordsman who refuses to kill the last remaining member of a rival clan. Instead he makes his way to America with the young baby to lose himself in the Old West.
Now marked for death by his own people, Yang attempts to hide himself in a small town at the edge of the desert in a town full of broken people and carnies who make up one of the strangest Old West small towns you’re ever likely to see on-screen.
The town has troubles of its own in the form of a vicious gang leader (Danny Huston) who occasionally terrorizes the town by showing up to rape its young women. Yang befriends one of the villain’s previous victims (Kate Bosworth) and helps her to learn the ways of the sword to take her revenge – just as he did.
Of course the villain’s gang and the entire Sad Flutes clan arrive at the same time and blood is spilled, revenge is had, and our hero, in true western fashion, walks off into the sunset alone.
Written and directed by South Korea’s Sngmoo Lee the film is a bit of a mess, even if it does have some charm. The town’s oddball characters are all a little too goofy (Geoffrey Rush, Tony Cox, Wayne Gordon, Christina Asher), and much like Zack Snyder Lee has too much love for slow-motion action sequences for my taste. For a film that’s mostly supposed to be a bloody fun action tale having multiple attempted rape scenes is probably not the best idea, either.
The DVD includes deleted scenes and a short behind-the-scenes montage featurette. A digital copy is also included on the Blu-ray. Given the film’s heavy action-sequences mixed with it’s dreamlike narrative some have compared it to Sucker Punch. The Warrior’s Way isn’t that bad, but it is a only partially successful mix of Asian cinema and American westerns.