The Tournament (18) **** Starring: Robert Carlyle, Kelly Hu, Ving Rhames. Dir: Scott Mann.
Like Battle Royale meets Rat Race, The Tournament combines an all out brawl between the worlds top assasins, and a group of sadistic gamblers into a film encompassing 24 hours, 30 assassins, one priest, and a $10m prize fund.
Following two converging stories of Father MacAvoy (Carlyle), an innocent priest who ends up an unwitting contestant in the deadly game, and Joshua Harlow (Rhames), the winner of the last Tournament 7 years ago, out on a vendetta to hunt down and slaughter the hitman who killed his wife.
Everyone likes a good gory film with lots of shooting and explosions, some people like that to extremes like Saw, and films that just generally fetishise blood, gore and torture. This is not one of those films. This has an air of Tarantino films including Kill Bill and Inglorious, is made with the same level of class, and comprises similar themes and jokes. Revenge, a rather amusing sequence involving a car being catapulted past a speed camera during the motorway chase scene, with the tag-line "That guy's got a ticket!", and an underlining web of trickery.
Other features of the film I enjoyed are the inclusion of a nice sadistic American assassin - everyone loves a sadist - Slade (Ian Somerhalder), and the spectacular freerunning skills of Sébastien Foucan (who some of you may know as the man who founded the art) as French hitman Bogart, who is the one who cunningly enlists MacAvoy into the game.
Overall, The Tournament is a thoroughly enjoyable film, moving us back from the torture filled mind numbing shock fest of the Saw franchise, and reintroducing us to gore with a deeper entertainment value.
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