QUICK THOUGHTS: The easiest question to ask before ever watching a second of The Tournament is why would the world’s top 30 assassins get involved in a tournament in which the last person alive is the winner? Of course, you could say “the money,” but these people are in a rather lucrative business where only a select few are involved, which would mean their income per job can’t be all that bad. On top of that, just imagine if you are the one assassin that sits out the tournament, which is held every seven years, you and whoever ends up winning are now the top dogs in the industry. You’re naming your own price. Bad guys who want someone dead are have only two options. Sounds like reason enough to me to sit out of a tournament you only have a 1-in-30 chance of winning.
However, let’s say you get involved in said tournament, in which you are equipped with a surgically implanted device that keeps track of your whereabouts so other competitors can find you and the wealthy gamblers betting on your life can watch via closed circuit surveillance cameras. Why is it only one of these competitors learns from the outset you can cut this device out of you and go about the game virtually invisible?
I guess the answer to both of these questions is one in the same, because if no one competed there would be no movie, just as would be the case should everyone cut out their tracking device. So, we suspend disbelief and sit back while trained assassins make red goo out of their rivals with Ving Rhames, Kelly Hu, Robert Carlyle and Ian Somerhalder all involved. It’s no real surprise The Tournament was relegated to a straight-to-DVD release, but as such it works as a piece of 95 minute entertainment. This is to say it is a Netflix rental at best.
This flick is filled with crater-causing head shots and active timebombs inside each of the Tournament’s participants. Should the 24 hour clock run out without a winner spontaneous combustion is likely to occur. We witness it twice in this flick and it is a mess I wouldn’t want to clean up.
SUPPLEMENTS: None
FINAL THOUGHTS: Like I already said, this is a rental at best, but it’s a perfectly fine feature that lives up to expectation, which is to say guns are fired and people die. However, I am still left wondering why the screenwriters set the premise of the Tournament up to include 30 of the world’s best assassins if they planned on killing off 12 of them via a standard movie montage. I know montages are all the rage in B-movie fare, but wouldn’t it have been just as easy to say it was a tournament of 18 assassins and save a few dollars on practical and special effects?
