Wushu Warrior
2010; directed by Alain Desrochers

As if you couldn't tell from its' generic title and badly-Photoshopped cover art, Wushu Warrior is a sub-par straight-to-video effort that offers nothing to the potential viewer besides a steady stream of cliches, poor acting, sloppy fights, and a lingering and perplexing feeling as to exactly why they pushed the play button in the first place.

Wushu Warrior's plot uses the well-worn tale of "white boy learns kung fu to save the day". While that story has been used at least somewhat effectively in movies like Kickboxer, American Shaolin, and The Forbidden Kingdom, in most cases, it rings true and exciting as the average bon mot contained inside a fortune cookie, and Wushu Warrior is no exception. In fact, many of the lines in the script, such as gems like "the branch does not bend too far from the tree", seem to be unabashedly "inspired" by those little sweet treats.

I could forgive the banal witticisms put forth here by the screenwriters, and perhaps even the wooden acting that features both Mandarin and British accents coming and going seemingly on a whim, making as much sense as a psycho ex-girlfriend leaving cryptic wall posts on your Facebook page, if the there was a shred of decent action displayed on-screen. Well, actually, there is a shred, but that's taking the word in a very literal sense.

Any time the fisticuffs threaten to actually excite the audience, the film-makers throw a monkey wrench into the proceedings by planting in some very poor-looking CGI effects and then abruptly stopping matters entirely. In a picture that goes on for only about eighty minutes, maybe you would think the running time could be padded with a few solid fights, but instead we get scenes that are painfully obvious in their purpose of plot exposition.

RATING: 3.5