THE TOURNAMENT review

The story is a simple one: every seven years, a group of thirty elite assassins battle it out, leaving only one standing, for a cash prize of ten million dollars. Backed by a mysterious gambling organization that has the power to cover up all incidents involving the kill games, disguising them as things like natural disasters or terrorist activity, each event is held in an unsuspecting town, putting the unknowing residents in the crossfire. This year that town is Middlesbrough, Great Britain, where in a hail of bullets the blood will fall like rain. In a twist of fate, a drunken and faithless preist, Father Macavoy (Robert Carlyle) is drawn into the carnage.
You see, each contestant is implanted with a tracking device, and one particularly clever one has taken his out and gotten it into Father Macavoy. Now the killers all think this pickled stumblebum with a collar is one of them. You also have Lai Lai Zhen (Kelly Hu) a beautiful and lethal woman, abandoned at birth, now one of the Triad's top hitters. She comes upon Father Macavoy, and becomes his protector when she susses out he's been turned into a sitting duck by one of her fellow contestants. Then there is Joshua Harlow (Ving Rhames) returning champion of the previous event, but "this time it's personal", as his wife was conveniently and mysteriously dispatched four months prior, and her killer is one of this years players. The other baddies are rounded out by a group of cliches that are straight out of a video game. We have the psychotic shotgun weilding Texan assassin, then there is the hulking bearded Krav Maga expert Russkie assassin, and let's not forget the parkour enhanced French assassin, etc etc.  Then of course there is command central, where the game is run by a nefarious controller  Powers (Liam Cunningham) who presides over a room full of money burning billionaires and their scantily clad escorts, refereeing the action playing out behind him on a wall of high tech video monitors that have tapped into the cities closed circuit cameras. Then there are the two computer dorks who run the technical end of things, while an ice queen of a director rides roost over them.
Cardboard characters be damned, you know what? This excess of a movie is a whole lot of overstylized fun. A popcorn muncher that plays like a cross between BATTLE ROYALE and MORTAL COMBAT.  It's hands down the bloodiest thing I've seen in a long long time. We have graphic and unflinching scenes of gouged eyes, exploding heads, bursting bodies, flying limbs, and the hits just keep comin'. The gore is relentless and the action is non-stop.
My main problem with the film is that at times it is from the school of cut-so-fast-they-don't-know-what-they-saw film making. Also, the plot holes are at times big enough to drive a tank through, but we all know these films don't play by real world rules and aren't written to stand up to Paddy Chayefsky standards don't we? Though I still wonder, if every seven years the world loses twenty-nine of the greatest assassins known to man, where are the new breed of "legendary killers" coming from? There must be an assassin tree growing somewhere on some mountainside, where the mobs around the globe can simply pluck new fruit from anytime they need a whack job done.
Myeh, I waive my hands and let it go. I'll let THE TOURNAMENT play by it's own rules. Director Scott Mann has delivered a flick that dutifully homages the hundreds of hardcore actioners that have come before it (fill in every Hong Kong title here and then some)  If it is  violence extremis you're  looking for, then THE TOURNAMENT is this weeks best game in town. You might want to bring a steel umbrella though, it's that bloody.