Dark Assassin (2005)

Dark Assassin (2005)
Aka: Dark Warrior 

 

Starring: Jason Yee, Cung Le, Tony Todd, Thomas Braxton Jr, Jennifer Yen
Director: Jason Yee
Action Director: Jason Yee

 

Dark Assassin is a low-budget action flick written, produced, directed and starring Sanshou champion Jason Yee. Sanhou is more or less Wushu adapted to tournament fighting, and is also referred to as Chinese Boxing. Whatever. The film’s low budget definitely shows, as does Yee’s inexperience as a director, as he frequently tries to add a unique visual style to what would be an otherwise routine actioner, only for the results to blow up in his face and take us the viewer out of the film.

Yee plays Derek Wu, a former mob enforcer type who worked for a businessman/heroin dealer named Buddah. Wu was thrown in prison after being caught with the drugs on him and was consequently disowned by Buddah while he served his four-year prison term. Now he’s out on parole and wants to put his violent past behind him, but things won’t work out quite that way. They never do. Wu’s problems begin when an unknown katana-wielding assassin (who’ll end being played by Cung Le) starts carving up everybody involved in Buddah’s racket. Both Buddah and Detective Harris, who was on the verge of busting Wu for murder before he got busted for drug running, think Wu is out for revenge. But we know better. Wu will have to face his violent past one last time if he wants any peace, even if it puts those he loves in danger.

Despite the alleged running time of 94 minutes, the film actually runs a scant 76 minutes (plus five minutes for the closing credits). That is good, because this slow-burn action thriller isn’t allowed to wear out its welcome…well, too much. There aren’t too many twists and turns here, so everything goes in pretty much the direction one might expect. The acting ranges from passable to unconvincing, but never quite descends to the level of outright painful. Yee, who scripted the film, probably could’ve cut down the use of the f-word a bit in the script. Tony Todd, who gets second billing on the DVD cover, has about one minute of screen time divided between three flashback sequences, in which he stands around in a stairwell spouting nonsensical philosophical drivel.

The action sequences tend to finish before they even begin, with the exception of a longer fight at Buddah’s estate and the final showdown between Jason Yee and Cung Le. The former is actually really bizarre, since it is photographed in a way that not only speeds up the fighting to an unnecessary degree, but is also altered so that it almost looks like a video game of the Shenmue variety. A few of the later fights suffer from the multiple-panel approach that Ang Lee used in his Hulk movie. But what really rubs salt in the wound is that the fights are shown in a single small panel with the rest of the screen pitch black. Why on earth would Yee obscure and shrink his fights like that? It makes no sense artistically. The finale fight is the best of the lot, with more complex choreography and some solid (by American standards) weapons work, as Yee matches Cung’s katana with two-fisted machetes. Cung gets to perform the flashier moves in the fight and comes across better on the whole. Jason Yee doesn’t look bad in his fights, but he does very little in the action direction department to distinguish himself from the likes of Thomas Ian Griffith and other straight-to-video martial arts stars from the previous decade.

In the end it’s an interesting curio, but some may find it disappointing as I did.