Rogue Assassin

Rating: NC16 (Some Violence & Nudity)
Running time: 105 minutes
Opens: 13 Sept 2007

All right, just a few points to note - 1) there’s also some coarse language used, 2) it’s spelt ROGUE not ROUGE. even Shaw’s naming of their picture file is spelt rouge lorh. amazing. what a big difference in meaning leh. for those who don’t believe, go check the dictionary and 3) it’s actually titled War on imdb and wikipedia. Re-titled to Rogue Assassin for Singapore.

All right, first up I spotted a couple of familiar faces other than the 2 main leads. One would be Devon Aoki who plays Kira in this show (previously starred in Dead or Alive live-action movie as Kasumi) and Sung Kang who plays Goi (starred in the recent Die Hard 4.0 movie as some minor character too.).

Next, this show features quite a lot of Japanese, and of course some Japanese dialogue (in fact much more than Rush Hour 3 imo). What’s with the recent “craze” of including something Japanese related in hollywood shows? Not that I mind though since it doesn’t really make any significant difference to me. As for the subtitling of the Jap audio I think it’s mostly pretty nicely done (at least no Big Tree nonsense =X). The words used in the show isn’t very cheem since I could understand most of what they’re saying even without the aid of subtitles. I guess it’s to aid the actors/actresses who need to pick up some lines in Jap just for this show (assuming they have no prior background whatsoever).

Jet Li is supposed to be a main lead right? Ok lah, he does get his fair share of screen time but the number of lines in the show is really quite little. At first I wanted to make a count of how many lines he had for the entire show but gave something like 45 minutes into the show. Anyway I think it’s quite little for a main lead. I think even Jackie Chan spoke more in his shorter 1.5 hour Rush Hour 3 movie than Jet Li did in the entire movie. And Jet Li still needs to work on his English though it’s quite decent lar.

Storyline wise, I thought Jet Li plays Mr Super Bad Guy again initially, till the twist is fully revealed towards the end of the show. But overall, you can still consider his role a villain (of sorts). Seems like he prefers to be Mr Baddie in hollywood movies. Is it to balance out all his 黄飞鸿 and other legendary heroes/figures in his Chinese martial arts films? Maybe I’m expecting quite a bit of action because there’s Jet, but it certainly is a far cry from what he normally offers in his Chinese martial arts film. Probably the latter is too tiring and age is catching up on him so he’s opting out of those type of shows (he has acted in enough already anyway.). On what the twist really is - no point telling you here. Defeats the purpose of watching the show liao. Then again, if you’re reading reviews on this movie elsewhere, I’m sure you’re bound to find out the answer.

Hmm, sponsors section! Saw Heineken VERY clearly even though it wasn’t exactly on screen for a long period of time. And of course all the car gurus will be able to recognise all those posh cars. Maybe phone gurus will be able to recognise the models used in the show as well. Haha. Wasn’t attentive this time around, partly due to a tired week (no thanks to school lah). And of course, if I can’t even look out for glaring sponsors, dont expect me to spot continuity errors liao lor. Sighx, I find that quite fun leh… Need to “create” time to repay sleep debt leh, or else can’t really fully enjoy movies I watch. Sadz.

Anyway, my take: 6/10. Nothing very exceptional, even for the fight scenes. The blood & violence is probably more explicit than most of the exciting action sequences. Probably already quite lenient (on my take)… Hahaha…

p.s. such an ordinary film i also can write so long. hic. and I want those cars… haha.