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Vanquisher
Originally intended for release in 2007, Vanquisher's production was halted when its' original star, Amy Chotiros, was involved in a scandal for wearing an "inappropriate" outfit to a Thai awards show. Why exactly this is important to a production that is ostensibly going for the international market anyway and marketing itself by featuring women in various skimpy outfits is just the first of many questions Vanquisher poses to the viewer. At any rate, the "Vanquisher" of the title is a CIA covert ops unit that is supposedly set up to protect Southeast Asia from terrorist attacks, but in actuality is a front for the US government to incite incidents to justify their invasion into Asian territories. After being left for dead after a failed mission, a former agent, Genja (Sophita Sribanchean in her debut film role), learns of Vanquisher's true intentions and sets off to stop them. And, oh yeah, some ninjas too.
Ninjas running around Bangkok? Did Godfrey Ho write this script? Well, he didn't, but this whole production has the stink of one of his low-budget efforts on it from the get-go. Even if the viewer can put aside huge holes in the story, like exactly how Genja -- who, again, was left for dead -- is allowed to return to her old job in the Bangkok police department, with apparently no one acting none the wiser, they're going to run into huge trouble with the acting. Like some Hong Kong productions from the late 1990's like Gen-X Cops that were developed with foreign markets in mind, half of the dialogue spoken here is in English. Presumably, this is done to make the dubbing easier and cheaper, but it ends up making the actors sound like they have speech impediments, as they constantly take pauses at the oddest times and are apparently reading a script translated by cutting and pasting it into Babelfish, resulting in bon mots like "You know. This is confidential. Information from. Vice president's office. You know."
Action-wise, the leading ladies do look good in leather and latex, but that's about it. The fights are nowhere near the level of better Thai productions like the Ong Bak films, subscribing to the too-close and quickly-edited style that hampers many modern action films, making the kinetics hard to follow. Even when the camera actually pauses on the action for more than three seconds, the obvious and clumsy-looking wirework employed doesn't make these supposed femme fatales look any better. The final nail in the coffin when it comes to the action sequences are some very poorly implemented CGI effects that makes the onscreen festivities look like something off of a cutscene from a Sega CD game circa 1995, not a feature movie made last year. I don't want it so seem like I'm coming off as snobbish here. I can enjoy a junky "girls with guns" movie along with anyone else, and have given out positive reviews to many films in the genre, including the 2006 Thai picture Chai Lai Angels. Even with their low budgets and suspect acting, female-oriented action movies can still be tremendous fun, mostly because the formula for these types of pictures is pretty simple: show good looking women kicking ass. The participants don't need to be Michelle Yeoh or Moon Lee, nor does the story have to be deep. These movies simply need to provide some sort of base excitement to the viewer, which unfortunately Vanquisher fails to do. RATING: 4 |
