#SNAKE EYES MOVIE#

I won’t pretend to know why this went down, but for a movie that wants to be as bad-ass as The Raid and John Wick (minus the R-rated gore, of course), the actual onscreen spectacle leaves much to be desired in terms of mere comprehensibility. Does that count as “inclusivity progress?”Īnd, yeah, for a movie that contains as much action as it does, and there’s a lot of varied combat set pieces, it’s a damn shame director Robert Schwentke and editor Stuart Levy shoot them like a bad Greengrass knock-off and then cut them to ribbons in the editing room. While Golding is fine, it’s another example of an incredibly charismatic leading man/romantic lead (see – Crazy Rich Asians and A Simple Favor) having his onscreen charm and star wattage toned down in service of a generic franchise action-hero leading role.

The relationship between Golding and Koji makes the generic story beats work beyond Mad Libs plotting and G.I. Ninja/samurai movies usually have to have some IP attached, be it James Bond ( You Only Live Twice and/or The Man With the Golden Gun), the X-Men ( The Wolverine), the Dark Knight ( Batman Begins) or Tom Cruise back when he was enough ( The Last Samurai). To be fair, it’s not like Ninja Assassin, The Hunted or any of the American Ninja sequels were big hits in their day. Like Cruella, you’ll wonder how much better Snake Eyes could have been without having to rely on known IP. Alas, neither hero/villain comes off well regarding value to the proceedings. Úrsula Corberó vamps like a champ as Baroness, while Samara Weaving makes a serviceable action figure as Scarlett. Snake Eyes is enjoyable enough as a singular ninja action drama that it suffers via the eventual intrusion of the G.I. I don’t know how faithful this is to the Larry Hama comics, but it works for the movie. At least one early second-act reveal recasts everything that’s come before and everything that follows without undercutting the previous 40 minutes. The film offers a few genuine twists or at least plot beats/character reveals that go comparatively off-script for these kind of IP exploitations.

Snake eyes