The Tournament (2009) – A Movie A Day 2021 #3
The Tournament (2009) – A Movie A Day 2021 #3
When I saw the DVD case for The Tournament, I didn’t have very high hopes for the movie contained within. The title is generic, and the cover is reminiscent of many other low-budget action movies packing the department stores of the world. But, as much as I’m not a fan of the floating-head-style of marketing that seems to dominate the home video market, in this instance it worked on me. Seeing Kelly Hu’s floating head next to a gun was all the convincing I needed to spend part of my evening watching The Tournament, and I’m glad I did.
The Tournament is an independent British action movie starring the aforementioned Kelly Hu alongside Ving Rhames and Robert Carlyle. The setup for the plot is rather generic, so my reading of the DVD case was fairly accurate in that regard. The tournament within The Tournament is battle-royale-inspired scenario where thirty of the world’s top assassins are brought together into a small town and set loose to kill each other in any way possible. There’s a group of anonymous rich people from all around the world watching from a secret location (by hacking into security cameras, satellites, etc.), and bets are made on which assassin will be the last one standing. The lone survivor wins the tournament and gets a giant cash prize along with bragging rights. Each assassin is implanted with a tracking device that also reads their vital stats (so the team in the control room can track who is dead), and if there isn’t a winner after 24 hours, all the tracking devices will explode. So, you know, a lot like Battle Royale.
So that’s the setup, but the actual story focuses on just a few of the assassins and one random civilian. Ving Rhames is Joshua, an assassin who has won a previous tournament. We learn early in the movie that he’s not back because of the promise of money and fame; he’s here for revenge. Someone close to Joshua has been killed, and he’s been led to believe one of the assassins participating in the current tournament is the person who did it. Elsewhere in the city, Lai Lai Zhen (played by Kelly Hu) is a somewhat stoic assassin who ends up feeling obligated to protect Father MacAvoy (played by Robert Carlyle), a drunken priest who gets caught up in the tournament after he accidently ingests one of the tracking devices. Lai Lai Zhen’s motivations for participating in the tournament are a mystery at first, and much of the story involves peeling back the layers of her story as she and Father MacAvoy converse more and more. A few of the other assassins are also featured throughout the movie such as Ian Somerhalder’s eccentric American psychopath Miles Slade and Sébastien Foucan’s quiet and smart free-running French assassin Anton Bogart, but the remainder of the thirty assassins are essentially props to get punched, kicked, shot, and blown up by the stars of the movie. And boy do they get punched, kicked, shot, and blown up.
I didn’t expect the action in this movie to be as fun as it is, so even though I enjoyed the story going on between our three main stars, the excessively violent and bloody action was the biggest treat for me. The movie begins by showing the final moments of the tournament that Joshua previously won, and the screen is filled with blood, bodies, fire, and bullets. It’s a great way to set the tone of the movie, and the action sequences throughout the remainder of the film always lived up to the promises made by that opening scene. There are some great martial arts sequences with Lai Lai Zhen battling various assassins in hand-to-hand combat, and there are huge set pieces with car chases, explosions, and many, many bullets fired. The action is abundant and varied, and it always kept me entertained. Plus, the movie doesn’t shy away from copious amounts of blood and gore (there is no shortage of exploding heads and bodies), and that will always get bonus points from me.
As you might expect, there are a few twists and turns in the movie’s story. The twists aren’t super twisty though, and even though I pretty much immediately figured out what was going to happen well in advance of it actually happening, I was still thoroughly entertained. The stars did a great job of getting me care about their characters, and the over-the-top action sequences had me smiling the entire time. Definitely check out The Tournament if you ever get a chance.