Invincible

This movie wasn't as good as it could have been. The potential was there, with a decent plot and a few good actors, but it was just not done well.

The idea of a group of different individuals putting their differences aside and coming together to achieve a common goal is not new, but it can be done well. Here it was not. I didn't watch the movie for the story, which was good as it was not real good. The whole "love will overcome all" is a good idea, but Os runs it into the ground to the point that he comes across as one of those fake happy lovely-dovey Mormon missionary types that makes most people nauseous.

Judging from the commercials and the packaging, I expected this to be more of a martial arts movie. Sadly, where most martial arts movies use the story to connect the fight scenes, this movie apparently forgot that it was a martial arts flick and concentrated on a really weak story at the expense of the fighting. One could count the number of fight scenes in this movie on the fingers of one hand and still have plenty of fingers left. The fights that it did have weren't all that great, either. The fighting relied a lot on wires, which is okay for a fairy-tale or a wuxia movie, but it just looked silly here. Also, it wasn't hard to tell that the actors trained just long enough to pull this movie's few fight scenes off. The actions weren't crisp or particularly fast, and they tried to hide all of this via flickering lighting, jerky camera shots and slow-motion. It was just not good from a martial arts perspective.

Unfortunately, most of this 90 minute snoozer is only worth fast-forwarding through, which I did for most of the last thirty minutes, and I'm kicking myself for not fast-forwarding earlier through the totally inane temptation scene. Fast-forwarding through a movie is something I almost never do, but I couldn't take it after an hour of drivel. This movie may have worked as a children's cartoon or some sort of kids live-action movie, but not as a movie aimed at a post-adolescent audience. Mel Gibson I can forgive for being involved in this silly movie, but Jet Li ought to know better. Hopefully he did it as a favor or lost a bet or something.

Bottom line - avoid this one.

I'm going to try and keep this as brief as possible, so please bare with me.

Well for a start the film had potential, it really did. And the first scene with Os fighting the White Warrior was pretty cool. In fact Zane looked like a cross between the Joker and the Crow. He actually looked cool. But then the film takes a quick u-turn into the world of luvvy duvvy and cute little bunny rabits, and we learn that in fact we must over power our enemies with..... No not a really sharp sword, no not even a bazooka..... LOVE!!! We must use love against our enemies.

Honestly people, I've never a known a line invoke so much violence and anger in me as that one. What a load of crap!! This is supposed to be a martial arts movie, not the follow up to Care Bears. In fact the ending to the film does have similarities with the ending of Care Bears.

Which brings me onto my next point, the look of the film reminds me so much of Mutant X, with it's wannabe SFX and slow motion fight sequences. If you were to delete the slow motion and Zane's constant preachy waffling narratives the film would be over in 5 mins flat. And I wish that was an exaggeration, I'm afraid however it's not. The film also seems to have stolen ideas from the likes of Highlander, Mortal Kombat and even a little bit of Tomb Raider.

I wouldn't usually get this upset about a bad movie but after reading some of the other reviews for the film I discovered that my American Brethren got to see it for free on TV, were as here in England the gits brought it out on DVD and I paid £3.75 to watch it.

Stay away from this film, all that preaching about love and how it will set you free seems to encourage violence.

I thinks that all I have to say. Except how on earth did the name Jet Li and Mel Gibson appear on the front cover of the film? Isn't that place usually reserved for the stars and director? They were executive producers the pair of them. Does that mean they sat down on the set for one day so the could get paid to plug the film? Talk about name dropping!

Well that's it. For now at least.

OK, if you've got the chops to put "matrix-like action" on your movie poster then you either have a really incredible martial arts film or you have "Invincible". Now my college roommate and I got such a kick out of this movie, we did our best to put it into out monthly movie line-up just so we could make fun of it. Billy Zane is classic Billy Zane in this movie. He has the quality of making dialogue that is incredibly inane seem incredibly important. At no point during this movie was there anything that even remotely resembled "matrix-like action" and the actors who play the martial arts studs all look like Ralph Macchio could probably stuff them in a locker. Like most "martial arts" movies the plot is stodgy at best but this is hidden by the fact that the special effects were created by hamsters. If you are a fan of train wrecks and mine cave-ins, this is a movie for you.

When this was being advertised on TBS back in 2001, every single ad featured Mel Gibson and Jet Li's names. They were only producers, but you wouldn't know it by the extent to which their names were featured.

I thought the film looked good back then - some kind of "Matrix"/"Highlander" clone, maybe, but it still looked kinda interesting. Well, I was wrong.

From the opening - with this angelic warrior being pursued by, and then fighting, Billy Zane - the film only becomes worse and worse. It copies "The Matrix" mercilessly - from the wannabe philosophy that stems throughout every scene to the slow-motion sword fights.

Billy Zane gives an embarrassingly dull performance and the rest of the cast - mostly B-movie actors or TV actors - don't help any.

The plot is silly to begin with. The Shadow Warriors are trying to bring an end to the world - replace "Shadow Warriors" with any other bad guy name from another psycho-baddie movie and you've got the exact same plot.

Billy Zane assembles together a group of warriors to help defend earth against the Shadow Warriors.

The ending of the film is so laughable it's almost painful to watch. I would never sit through this again and certainly would never recommend it to anyone else.

"Invincible" to criticism it is not.

Wow, this is a prime example of previews making a movie look awesome. I rented Equilibrium and saw the previews for Invincible, and I said to myself, "Wow that looks really good!" Wow was I wrong, terrible acting, poor lighting, sad fights and the supporting roles made me want to vomit! Do yourself a favor do not rent movies on the basis of their previews, trust me I should know! -n8gray315