Scott Mann’s “The Tournament” looks and feels like an ‘90s action movie, the kind that relies on an overly simplified premise that is supposed to pass for a storyline, but is really just an excuse for a whole lot of wanton bloodshed. Mind you, not that that’s a bad thing. In this case, it just feels a little bit overdone, and after a while all the shooting, eccentric characters, and violence dulls the senses and makes you question the meaning. Naaaaaaah. Kidding, kidding. It just gets tedious after a while, that’s all, which is something you don’t want an audience to say especially when things (and people) are blowing up every other minute in your movie. In fact, if not for Robert Carlyle as a drunkard priest, the film feels more like 90 minutes of bullet squib practice for an actual movie that hasn’t been greenlit for production yet.


Scott Mann’s “The Tournament” looks and feels like an ‘90s action movie, the kind that relies on an overly simplified premise that is supposed to pass for a storyline, but is really just an excuse for a whole lot of wanton bloodshed. Mind you, not that that’s a bad thing. In this case, it just feels a little bit overdone, and after a while all the shooting, eccentric characters, and violence dulls the senses and makes you question the meaning. Naaaaaaah. Kidding, kidding. It just gets tedious after a while, that’s all, which is something you don’t want an audience to say especially when things (and people) are blowing up every other minute in your movie. In fact, if not for Robert Carlyle as a drunkard priest, the film feels more like 90 minutes of bullet squib practice for an actual movie that hasn’t been greenlit for production yet.

The Tournament” has one of those premise that fits on a movie poster: every 7 years, in a small, clueless town somewhere in the world, 30 of the world’s best assassins are brought together to compete in a kill-or-be-killed tournament, whereby the last one standing wins a cool $10 million. Meanwhile, your usual assortment of rich fat cats bet on the game from the comforts of the tournament holder’s operation center, which in this case consists of exactly two rooms – the one where two tech guys mindlessly type on keyboards but somehow manages to run the whole show anyway, and a dark, shady looking boardroom with big screen TVs. The tournament is run by a gentleman name Powers (Liam Cunningham), a man who is apparently so rich and so well-connected that all his tournaments, and all the mayhem and death that results, are easily swept under the rug or blamed on terrorists.
The chosen location for the current game is a small, sleepy British town. Into this oblivious arena arrive our 30 contestants, with the more notable ones being Chinese hitwoman Lai Lai Zhen (Kelly Hu), the crazy Texan Miles Slade (Ian Somerhalder), the reigning champ Joshua Harlow (Ving Rhames), and an athletic parkour-powered Frenchman (Sebastien Foucan). There are, of course, 26 others, but since most of them get shot in the face, blown up, or decapitated early and often, we needn’t waste our time learning their names. Indeed, the majority of these so-called “elite assassins” have the combat skills and marksmanship of a crackwhore with a gun, and are really little more than fodder to be mindlessly killed off to increase the bodycount. The final contestant is Father Macavoy (Robert Carlyle), the town priest who finds himself pulled into the tournament when one of the contestants decides to cheat.