I didn’t have the opportunity to see The Warrior’s Way in theaters. This was partly because it wasn’t screened for critics but mostly because it came and went so quickly that I hardly had a chance and it simply slipped through the cracks like so many genre films do.
The plot concerns Yang (Jang Dong-gun), a warrior-assassin, who is sent to kill a small child, the last member of an enemy Refusing the mission Yang takes the child with him into hiding. Hunted by his clan Yang finds refuge in a rundown carnival town in the American West only to find that the locals are frequently terrorized by The Colonel (Danny Hudson) and his small army of cowboy ruffians. Yang is presented with the difficult choice of keeping his anonymity or using his training to liberate his newfound friends from The Colonel’s tyranny.
This isn’t the first time that a director has attempted to combine elements of the American Old West with a Samurai twist but, despite the rich history between the Western genre and Japanese cinema, the majority of these films have often been disappointing. Most notably are 1997’s Once Upon a Time In China and America starring Jet Li, 2007’s Sukiyaki Western: Django directed by Takashi Miike and 2008’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird from Kim Ji-woon. Of these three films only Kim’s film, which is more a madcap comedy than a traditional western, is entirely satisfying. So where does The Warrior’s Way fit in? By the wayside I’m afraid.
Visually I quite like the film. It takes elements from various sources like HBO’s Carnivale and Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and marries it with the equally cartoonish world of Kung Fu Hustle. The fantasy setting works, but the script and the majority of its characters, which include Geoffery Rush as the town drunk and Kate Bosworth as the beauty with a painful past, feel thin and uninspired. It’s not nearly as empty or forced as Jonah Hex or the equally dreadful Ninja Assassin but all the style and combat choreography, no matter how well it is done, can’t make up for the film’s lackluster script.
Bonus features are limited to a behind-the-scenes footage and a handful of deleted scenes.