JIU JITSU (2020) *

You know, I was looking forward to Jiu Jitsu.  It had a wacky premise (it’s basically Mortal Kombat Meets Predator), a stacked cast (which includes Nicolas Cage, Alain Moussi, Tony Jaa, and Frank Grillo), and a director whose work I have enjoyed in the past (Dimitri Logothetis).  Nothing could’ve prepared me for how bad it really was. 

The first sign of trouble is the comic book panels and rotoscoping that make the various chapter breaks look like a graphic novel.  It’s one thing to make a movie with a comic book sensibility.  It’s another thing to gratuitously call attention to itself, saying, “Look at this!  It’s just like a comic book!”  That shit didn’t cut it in the director’s cut of The Warriors and it doesn’t cut it here. 

Another problem is the first-person fight scenes that occur early on.  If there’s anything worse than shaky-cam action sequences, it’s a first-person fight scene that makes the various shootouts, fistfights, and Kung Fu battles look like a video game.  What really gets annoying is how the action switches from the perspectives of Moussi and Jaa within the same scene.  All the hopping around back and forth from their POV just makes the action that much more disorienting. 

I was a fan of Moussi’s work in the Kickboxer movies (the second of which was also directed by Logothetis).  However, the plot does him a great disservice as it calls for him to have amnesia for much of the picture.  He has the potential to be a fine actor, but you’d never know it when all he gets to do in this movie is walk around in a daze and scowl like he’s got an ice cream headache.

Despite a promising premise, it’s more than a little sad that the movie just lazily copies and pastes the plots of Predator and Mortal Kombat together to make a clip art version of a movie instead of at least coming up with some sort of new slant on the material.  The monster is invisible and uses infrared scopes to hunt for his prey just like in Predator, and Cage’s character is obviously supposed to be the stand-in for the Christopher Lambert incarnation of Raiden. 

At least Cage brings some sort of energy to the movie.  He too seems to be borrowing freely from other films, as he sometimes plays his character as a slacker modeled on The Big Lebowski, while other times he rants and raves like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now.  It’s enough to make you wish Cage starred in a legit Predator sequel and called it a day instead of popping up in a slightly-classier-than-an-Asylum-mockbuster knockoff.

It’s a shame that a movie starring Jaa, Cage, and Grillo turned out so dull.  Grillo is particularly wasted as he’s mostly around to bark orders and disparage Moussi’s amnesiac character for not “remembering the plan”.  When Jaa first came onto the scene in Ong Bak he proved he was the most exciting martial artist on the planet.  After the awesomeness of The Protector, he was never quite able to capitalize on that early promise.  Jiu Jitsu is not an ideal vehicle for his talents, but we do get one scene where he uses his patented knee attack to bash his enemies.  However, that’s not enough to make it worthwhile. 

Jiu Jitsu moves like lead, and when a burst of action does happen, it’s so chaotic that most of the joy is sucked right out of it.  (Many of the fight scenes feature way too much slow motion.)  Once we finally get to the fighting tournament, it’s nothing more than a series of repetitive matches with predictable outcomes.  You can only take so much of a guy in a cut-rate Guyver costume beating up on people before it gets dull.  The fights themselves are uninspired, interchangeable, and forgettable, which is perplexing as I thought Logothetis did a pretty solid job on Kickboxer:  Retaliation’s action sequences.

 In short, Jiu Jitsu is Jiu Shitsu.