Redbelt

Redbelt

Rated R

Running time: 1 hr 39 mins

Cast:

Chiwetel Ejiofor
Emily Mortimer
Tim Allen

Critical consensus:

*** out of *****
(77% Fresh Rating!)

Matt's Take:

D

Mikey @ The Movies Official Rating:

* out of *****

The premise:

A fateful event leads to a job in the film business for top mixed-martial arts instructor Mike Terry. Though he refuses to participate in prize bouts, circumstances conspire to force him to consider entering such a competition.

MY REVIEW

Redbelt is kind of a messy movie. What I mean is that everything about it seems to be all over the place and not very finely tuned. We also have a story that in my mind, lacks any powerful punch. This film was described as a character study on my Netflix slipcover. After watching the film, I actually think all these characters are very one dimensional and we didn't really get any true insight to a single one of them. I also thought there were to many characters that just came and went throughout the story. A huge supporting cast consisting of Tim Allen (can anyone tell me what his role was in the overall story?), Ricky Jay (the man pulling a lot of the strings in the story), David Paymer (a random role whos character seemed important, but was he actually??), the list goes on. Just way to much character flow and I personally did't understand the importance of half of them.

I think this was trying to be some kind of artsy film. Which I think is hard to do with a story like this. This kind of story will usually always have to much flash to be dummed down to an arthouse picture. So in that regard, it severely failed my eyes. One thing that annyoyed the heck out of me was this constant repeating of lines. Again, I think that was some for of artsy filmmaking technique, but actually it was very annoying. There were NUMEROUS instances where almost every character would repeat the same line they just said, two or even three times. Was that some kind of a weird metaphor? Or just a director trying to do much with a film that you can't do a whole lot with?

The filmaking felt very ameteur to me. There were scenes that went on way to long. There were scenes where it appeared the actors had no clue what they were doing. There seemed to be moments where they called cut but left the camera running anyway and what we get is moments of actors just sitting there looking confused. Thats kind of how it felt the whole movie. Or maybe I was just deeply confused by the whole bloody thing and I'm just taking it out on the movie. The musical scoring at times was loud and powerful but then would stop abrubtly, as if the sound guy fell asleep on some button. The film appeared to be edited by a first timer, it was really choppy at times and like I said, some stuff went on way to long.

Even the performances were pretty bad. Chiwetel Ejiofor (Talk to Me, Inside Man)was the only one who stood out to me. The rest of the cast just seemed like they were bored and wanted something to do. They all gave pretty blah performances. I guess because they are all out of work actors. The worst one of them all was Alice Braga. Man she was terrible. She was the queen of that line repeating thing as well. Her character was annoying, and her performance was disgustingly bad.

I say nay to this film.

To view this films theatrical trailer, click this link: Redbelt

*This is the 96th new film I've seen and reviewed this year.

*This film is now on DVD.