The Tournament (2009) Review

No this is not a scene from Pulp Fiction 2


After overindulging myself in horror films throughout October, I wanted to do a little change-up in my film genre intake. I received an e-mail from Blockbuster informing me of a Blockbuster-exclusive release entitled The Tournament. I have never heard of the film before, but I decided to queue it after I read the synopsis (more on that later) and saw that bad ass Ving Rhames had a starring role. Rhames is always a good time when he smackign people around and making them his bitches - unless you count the remake of Day of the Dead, for which I reluctantly gave him a mulligan. Oh yeah, my review...

The Tournament is about an underground competition that takes place every seven years between 30 of the most vile assassins ranging from all over the globe. The game is overseen by a shady corporation that takes bets on the winner from very high rolling clientele. The rules are for their contest is simple:

1) Last man standing after 24 hours is the 10 million dollar cash prize winner. That's much more then you make playing poker online.

2) If there are multiple survivors alive after the 24-hour time limit, everyone dies and there is no winner.

3) Each contestant has a GPS/time bomb surgically injected into their bodies. This way, the management overseeing the game is always aware of all players' locations at all times. The assassins in the game also have access to the GPS locations of their foes as well.

4) That's pretty much the entire rulebook. The assassins can do whatever they need to do to off their competition.

The film opens with the closing moments of the Tournament from seven years ago. Joshua Harlow (Ving Rhames) becomes the winner after eliminating that year's main tourney "baddie" before having to kill off the runner-up, an apparent friend who is too mortally wounded to continue. Harlow wins the Tournament, becomes 10 million bucks richer and retires from the game to marry the love of his life.

Fast forward seven years later to the current Tournament, we get to learn about this year's favorites from the game's coordinator Powers (Liam Cunningham). And we also learn that Harlow is coming back to defend his title, so to speak. In the time frame before the Tournament, Harlow's wife is brutally murdered in Miami by an assassin apparently sent to kill Harlow himself. Harlow learns that his wife's murderer is a participant in the current Tournament, prompting him to come out of retirement and avenge her death...once he can learn the assassin's identity.

Rounding up the rest of the relevant assassins are favorite Lai Lai Zhen (Kelly Hu), the unwilling participant and priest Father Joseph MacAvoy (Robert Carlyle) and the psychotic Miles Slade (Ian Somerhalder). Unfortunately for the man of the cloth, one of the assassins cuts his own GPS unit out of his body and puts it into some coffee that MacAvoy ingests. Soon all of the assassins are trying to slaughter the confused priest until Zhen explains what is going on to him and then vows to protect him. Meanwhile, Slade runs around killing assassins and innocents like a man who is clearly off his rocker, even for an assassin. His actions establish him as the murderer of Harlow's wife. But is he really?




The real question is who out the lights out in his mainstream career?


This film is fairly predictable, but it packs a whole lotta of action. And that is the important part, not character development or a complex script. You'll have everything figured out well before the twists and turns in the last 15 minutes or so, but you will be well entertained by the time the film reaches the conclusion.

The acting is exactly what one would expect in an action yarn. Rhames plays...well, the usual character Rhames plays. Hu, while being extremely beautiful, shows why her claim to fame is her small and non-speaking role in X2 as the female Wolverine. What she lacks in the thespian arts she makes up for in toughness because I do believe that she performed a majority of her minor stunts. So I will give her credit there for being a tough, yet very sexy cookie.

The two best performances are provided by Carlyle and Somerhalder. I don't ever think I have seen Carlyle "mail-in" any of his performances. I'd even go out on a limb to state that I have never seen him deliver a performance that I would deem as "questionable". So it blows my mind how much of his star quality has diminished after 90's. The man is a great actor and I don't know why he is not in any top flight films any longer. Somerhalder plays as a great villain in this film, but not as good as he does with his Damon character on The Vampire Diaries (yes I watch it, sue me). One of those reasons is his character's accent. For some reason, the director felt that giving a southern accent to Slade's character was necessary, but it's obvious that Somerhalder kinda struggles with his accent's authenticity. This really makes no difference because the man simply plays a great psycho. When you look at the man eyes...dude looks crazy as hell. Like John Witherspoon said in Little Nicky: "You givin' me the crazy eyes!"




Look! It's Rob Lowe's evil doppleganger


As far as the plot goes: if you are thinking that the story elements sound familiar, you are absolutely correct. In 1994, Albert Pyun made a film called Mean Guns which follows the same concept. Except that the story takes place in a prison instead of an entire city and also contains lower production values. As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, the synopsis really got me excited to see this film. It sounded very similar to Mean Guns, albeit with a larger budget and no Thom Matthews, and that was definitely a driving force to see it.

Watching The Tournament is a really good time and something to check out if you are up for taking in an action film one night. But please rent, don't buy because there is not a lot of replay value. At 90 minutes, the length is just right for such a fast-paced flick. Director Scott Mann really delivered a great product and I would take a look at any of his future action films if he remains in the genre.




"Sometimes when I get nervous, I put my fingers in my armpits and then smell them...like this!!!"