Fisted.

You have offended my family and you have offended the Shaolin Temple.”

- Bruce Lee in ‘Enter The Dragon”.


If we consider the martial-arts film to be an art form, what then are we to make of ‘The Man With The Iron Fists’? It is a ballet with Russell Crowe reciting poetry stage left. It is a Ming vase tagged with graffiti. It is Haiku with a uh, uh, uh at the end of every line. It is Bruce Lee with bling. It is The Man With The Iron Fists - with ‘DOPE’ tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and ‘FAKE’ tattooed on the other. It’s Kill Bill Unchained’, all gangsta rap arrogance and grindhouse thrills, but it’s never as good as you want it to be and never as good as it wants to be. The fighting set pieces (and we all in came for the fighting, right?) have gory, comic inventiveness but nothing seems to happen in real time and they are poorly edited and badly scored to hip hop beats and sampled cues. There is no sting to the action and no purpose to the plot. It was a mistake to run with RZA as he has no screen presence at all. Russell Crowe in Clint Eastwood drag channels Richard Burton and ends up like your uncle doing a Brian Blessed impression. Lucy Lieu still thinks she’s on the set of ‘Kill Bill. The villains look like they’re in a big hair/cock rock video. Worst of all it teeters uncomfortably between homage and crap the whole way through meaning you can never really go with it. You’re expecting it to fall on it’s feet at any moment and when it doesn’t you convince yourself that it’s actually quite good but then along comes something else to make you wonder if anyone knew what they were doing. It’s very strange, an homage to martial arts films that misses all the points about what made them so enjoyable in the first place and a weird clash of cultures that loses everything in translation.