The Tournament actually makes you dumb enough to enjoy it
There are parts of the new action film The Tournament (2009) that are irredeemably stupid. However it speaks to a basic reptilian part of my brain that doesn’t consider irredeemable stupidity to be a deal-breaker.
The premise is that every seven years a bunch of degenerate billionaire gamblers organize a contest in which a bunch of the world’s deadliest assassins all try to bump each other off with the last competitor walking away with a big cash prize and the knowledge that he or she is the best in the business. (Contracts presumably heat up afterwards due to the winner’s increased status and to the lack of competition.) If you have a functioning brain you’re probably already sensing all kinds of problems with this set-up.
Would professional hitmen really agree to commit murder in front of witnesses and allow the entire event to be filmed by hundreds of CCTV cameras? After all the service that hitmen provide is not to simply kill someone (anybody with a gun can do that) but rather to kill someone and get away with it without leaving a trail of evidence leading to the arrest of the assassin or his employer. A guy who meticulously removes fingerprints from the scene of a crime is going to be reluctant to kill 30 people in front of a video camera in order to attract attention to themselves especially since attracting attention is the last thing contract killers should want to do.
For the first few minutes of The Tournament I was scoffing so loudly that I couldn’t hear the dialogue despite the fact that the dialogue was being shouted at great volume by characters who were supposedly hiding from one another. No sneaking around no deceptive tactics just loudmouths with machine guns stomping around out in the open yelling “Come out come out wherever you are!” Geez Louise!
Then we flash forward seven years to the next tournament and learn that the miniature tracking devices implanted in all of the contestants are now rigged to explode in 24 hours if the contest isn’t completed giving the game a time limit and ripping off better movies like Escape from New York (1981) and Battle Royale (2000). Contestants begin the event with a handy-dandy little pocket gizmo that shows the location of the other contestants. Each person also finds a tiny little stitched-up incision in their abdomen. Clearly the first thing the killers should do is remove the implants from their bodies so they can’t be tracked. Why on Earth haven’t any of these bozos figured that out?
Then one of them does. A clever assassin pops out his implant and tosses it into the coffee pot at a diner so that the other killers will chase the poor schlub who swallows the device instead of him.
The device winds up in Robert Carlyle here playing a comically drunken priest. The assassin is played by Sebastien Foucan co-developer of the art of Parkour and famous for his free-running scenes in Casino Royale (2006) and District B13 (2004). Then Foucan starts running on rooftops taking out snipers who can no longer detect his presence. It is at this point that I quit complaining about logical flaws and start having a good time.
It gets better. The other assassins include Ving Rhames (big and scary) Kelly Hu (gorgeous and sexy) and that guy who played Boone on Lost (shoots a dog just to be mean). Hu takes the drunken priest under her wing and tries to protect him from an endless hail of bullets. The biggest shootout takes place in a strip club and stuff blows up real good every couple of minutes. If you like your action flicks fast loud messy and stupid this one’s a solid rental.
