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The Tournament Review
The Tournament is a full on action movie featuring a varied cast of assassins fighting in a seven yearly scheduled tournament to determine the best assassin who wins a massive cash prize for their efforts. The tournament is watched behind the scenes by a collection of billionaires who follow the action via CCTV and get to place their bets on the outcome of the tournament. Each participant in the tournament is implanted with a tracking device which allows them to be followed by the behind the scenes crew and also to be located by the other assassins.
The cast is pretty wide and varied and movie and TV fans should recognize most of the cast, playing Father Joseph Macavoy is Robert Carlyle, a religious man who ends up ingesting one of the locator’s when one of the assassins Anton Bogart removes his and drops it in a pot of coffee. Anton is played by Sebastien Foucan, who is one of the founder of Parkour and brings that amazing athleticism and agility to the movie here. Ving Rhames plays Joshua Harlow the former winner of the last tournament and has entered this years event because his wife and unborn baby got murdered, he believes one of the assassins did it and now he can get his revenge and claim the cash prize. Also on the cast is the beautiful Kelly Hu playing Lai Lai Zhen an assassin who want to change her life and she ends up teaming up with Father Joseph, finally we have Ian Somerhalder playing the very deranged and violent Miles Slade who really gives you a baddie to dislike in this movie.
If you haven’t worked it out by now The Tournament is very much about the action and the movie kicks off as it means to go on with some all out action flashbacks from the previous tournament. After that the movie never lets up and some of the action scenes are really really good, well choreographed, varied and full of style and a hell of a lot of explosions. I loved the tournament, it reminded me of action movies from the early nineties, there is no tongue in cheek comedy here it’s played straight and that helps to bring a sense of involvement with the action you genuinely are unsure how things are going to turn out. If you like your action movie fast, frenetic and serious then The Tournament is going to be a movie for you, forget the underplayed character development which is there just not the main star and enjoy the over the top action scenes, massive amounts of gore and an ending which is suitably satisfying.
The Tournament is out to buy on DVD now and comes highly recommended for action junkies.
