Saturday Movies: The Man With the Iron Fists (2012)

It's the less popular slavery revenge story of 2012...That basically sums up The Man With the Iron Fists. I'm not exactly sure why some of this cast signed up for the movie including Russel Crowe. I understand why a wrestler like Dave Bautista might, but not Crowe. This is not going to be a career reviving role. RZA should also probably never direct or write a movie again if he thinks doing what he did in this movie was somehow acceptable. You can also tell the guy did some soundtrack work for Quentin Tarantino, and thought he should try to do a movie in the style of Kill Bill, and he forgot to not set in the 1800s.

Everyone is on the hunt for some treasure in a Chinese village, and they are all wanting to find the gold, especially a group of assassins who will tear up the village to find it. A blacksmith begins to sense the threat descending on the village, and works to defend his people enlisting the help of a rogue British soldier, who didn't really come there to harm anyone in the process of searching for some gold. These two guys though team up with a brothel of women to stop the bad guys from tearing their village apart.


There are a couple of good actors in the film, but sadly they can't save what was a terrible script. It's sort of a shame because the movie is visually really pretty in some moments, and he somehow got these people to be in his movie, and then he gives them a terrible script to read. Some of those lines I will never be able to erase from my head. I'll give the movie credit though, the last hour or so really did entertain me even if I couldn't help laughing at moments not intended to be comedic.

Russel Crowe is a good actor, and he really does bring his all to his character, Jack Knife. Maybe he read the script and decided it would be best to just relax and have fun with this one, or at least that is how it reads. Surprisingly, Lucy Liu churned out a character I did like from the movie, Madame Blossom. She was just really kick butt, and you rarely see that in women in movies. The end part where she gathers the women in her brothel to kick butt salvaged the movie for me.

RZA also stars in his own movie, and I can't say he did much that was really notable on screen. He stays serious the whole time and that is about it. What really weakens the movie though is the rest of the cast not saying their lines that well, and the fact they were reading terrible lines on top of that. It pulled the movie way down, and it took away from what looked like a movie that had been worked hard on visually and stylistically. I also couldn't help but thinking the whole time that this guy just looked like someone really wanting to do a Tarantino movie.

The Man With the Iron Fists misses the mark in capturing the seriousness it wanted to with the characters, but it does provide some fun moments to watch at the end as the characters finally battle it out. RZA though should probably stick with the music he is known for making for movies though, and leave Tarantino to do his movies instead of trying to basically do a weaker version of them.

Rating 5 of 10.