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I stumbled upon this one basically by accident. While channel surfing at midnight, this came on, and saw an ordinary world kid in some pretty ancient looking forest, exploring it with a "where am I?" face, so I pretty much could tell this was some outsider boy who lives adventures in a fantasy world.
If you haven't noticed from the mere cover of the movie, this is no Lord of the Rings. Even worse, it doesn't live up to cult classic fantasies like Krull, Willow or Dark Crystal.
I'm a big fan of fantasy movies that deal with what I like to call "the outsider myth": some kid magically travels to a distant land and lives adventures (who wouldn't like to?), so I was left hypnotized with the potentially entertaining story and, (forgive me) the Elysia character.
However, one of many flaws with this movie are the Warriors of Virtue themselves. They're kinda rat or kangaroo-looking people with great martial arts knowledge. Rather out of place for this type of fantasy, and when you see them in action, it just doesn't work. It's like watching sports mascots practicing kung fu. Much more laughable than exciting.
This can be a turn off if you expected classic sword and sorcery swashbuckling, for instead, it delivers martial arts in flurry costumes.
The sets are awful, with no variety. No exploration of this fantastic (sarcasm) land is ever done, and all you see is a forest, an evil palace lair, the same forest and huts on trees in (you guessed it) the forest.
The main villain, one girly, over-the-top emperor, is both campy and not so evil. There appears to be a major battle to occur between his soldiers and the good guys, but no real sword fight ever occurs. Instead, you see more fluffy karate. The Evil Emperor inexplicably splits into five guys and fights all five warriors. If you thought that would be boring, they even show it in blurry vision, just another sign of the movie's inappropriately low budget. And by the end, the bad guy somehow has amnesia, forgets he was so cruel and joins the good guys (to make things even more yawn inducing). Like you could actually care. An underrated score by Don Davis helps the movie from falling completely into oblivion, but not an entirely new sound.
The mythology might sound good, so maybe a remake some decades later could squeeze some more juice to the premise. But, until that happens, you can keep "Warriors of Virtue" on the shelf and pass it on.
score 3/10
RichardKleiner 19 August 2009
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2114088/ |
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6-4-2021 02:10:10