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Movie review: ‘The Warrior’s Way’

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A master swordsman leaves his homeland of warring clans for the Wild West in the bloody wuxia/shoot-em-up hybrid “The Warrior’s Way.” But South Korean filmmaker Sngmoo Lee’s debut feature is less a genre-spanning romp than a tiresome lab experiment in computer-generated tropes and green-screen oppressiveness.

The human part involves quietly dashing Korean star Jang Dong-Gun as the stoic, blade-wielding nomad Yang, who brings his waylaid enemies’ lone survivor, a baby girl he can’t bring himself to kill, to an American frontier outpost made up mostly of circus workers led by a welcoming ringmaster named Eightball (the always appealing Tony Cox).

There Yang takes over a laundry, grows flowers, teaches the spiritual side of knife-throwing to a lipsticked yet still grime-laden Annie Oakley type ( Kate Bosworth, working her own unfortunate hybrid of yeehaw and sultry) and tussles with a perverted colonel in a burn mask ( Danny Huston, all leer, sweat and tongue) who regularly terrorizes the locals, while Geoffrey Rush regularly terrorizes us with his clichéd town drunk.

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The real showdown, though, comes when our hero’s none-too-happy master makes a third-act appearance with an army of black-clad assassins, who swoop ninja-style onto the rooftops like a murder — no, make that slaughter — of crows.

The aforementioned image is an admittedly nifty only-in-martial-arts-extravaganzas entrance, cartoony but kicky, and appropriately pregnant with mayhem, which Lee then delivers with no lack of R-rated gusto. But for the most part, “Warrior’s Way” — an outdoor story shot indoors, “300”-style — is a regrettable example of the cyclical nature of movie special effects.

The digitized backdrops and blood sprays, physics-defying stuntwork and micro-slo-mo tours of traveling bullets and slashing blades is technically admirable, but this menu of action schematics has become as stultifyingly rote as rear-screen projection and stop-motion inevitably were to earlier generations of moviegoers.

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What’s missing, like a hole, is a visionary personality — think Stephen Chow or Johnnie To — who can turn comically violent Pop art on its head. Lee’s hunger to flamboyantly distract with his bag of tricks is never in doubt, but “The Warrior’s Way” is a dead end and too often plays like a requiem for showoffs.

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‘The Warrior’s Way’

MPAA rating: R for strong bloody violence

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Playing: In general release

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