fredroyer For those of you who grew up in the 80s like me, the old time USA channel only had things to show: WWF, and badly dubbed Kung Fu movies produced by the Shaw Brothers.The plot, as it were, is a combination of all of those movies. The movie is hysterical. No one involved is taking themselves seriously (how could they?) and wow, it sure does look like Russell Crowe is having the time of his life.

adonis98-743-186503 The Man with the Iron Fists is a movie starring Russell Crowe, Cung Le, and Lucy Liu. On the hunt for a fabled treasure of gold, a band of warriors, assassins, and a rogue British soldier descend upon a village in feudal China, where a humble blacksmith looks to defend himself and his fellow villagers. The most suprising thing of all from this film must have been seeing Dave Bautista turning into a golden "cousin of Colossus" plus Russell Crowe was pretty good and RZA as well and it's to bad that the sequel that they made a few years later called The Man with the Iron Fists 2 was so laughably bad and over the top because even tho this one is kind of silly it's actually alot of fun.

Nasty_Itch This is easily the worst movie I've ever watched. And I have watched a ton of cheap kung-fu flicks, and they are, despite their low production, shallow story lines and predictable plots, waaaaaay better than this... movie.First of all - the plot is horrible. It's just so incredibly dumb. It makes sense that rap "artist" is behind this wreck, because the dialogue, the scenery, everything is so tacky and cringy and awful it hurts. Even something banal, like character hairstyles, makes you want to stop watching, it's so unconvincing a laughably bad. And even the fighting scenes, which are supposed to be the strongest point of this genre, are just horrible. The battle choreography is extremely lousy done and chaotic. Tacky colors don't help either. And above all that comes the sad llama face of the main protagonist, whose acting skills can be compared to those of a brick. I can't in all honesty believe that somebody actually read this script and said "let's do this". There is absolutely nothing good about it. I'm still in shock from what I've seen. I can't imagine bigger fail than making an homage to kung-fu classics in this day and age with all the technology and cinematography available and creating a movie which is undeniably worse than those flicks made with rope and stick 30 or 40 years ago. A fail of epic proportions. And they made a sequel. Unfathomable.

Steve Van Kooten It's good to know that film companies have not yet given up on the idea of taking a well- known, accomplished filmmaker and coaxing him/her to slap their name on whatever crap they have laying around to make it somehow more marketable. Wes Craven seemed to have some crappy horror movie hitting video store shelves every week with all the horrible flotsam that had his name plastered all over their covers.In this case, Quentin Tarantino's name is inexplicably tied to this utterly ludicrous vehicle for rapper RZA to show off his lack of acting ability and love of kung fu movies. The story, for what passes as such, features a menagerie of skilled fighters crossing paths in Jungle Village as rival clans kill each other and nefarious alliances are forged and broken in order to procure a large sum of gold. In the middle of this is Blacksmith (RZA), who ends up on a revenge quest when the treacherous lion clan cut off his arms AND murder his woman! If that's not a recipe for martial arts style revenge then I don't know what is!Sigh. OK, I like bad movies... I love them, actually, and ridiculous Kung fu movies are usually right up my alley; unfortunately, "Man With the Iron Fists" offers little beyond it's superficial love letter to films like "Man With the Golden Arm" and "Fists of Fury". Yes, there's a lot of explicit violence, gore and people waving impractical weapons around, but the story never amounts to anything more than a hodge-podge of set pieces that never fully stitch together into a whole movie.On the bright side, there is still a LOT of silly nonsense going on here: befuddling Motley Crew hair cuts, hilarious costumes, an embarrassingly juvenile sense "isn't this so awesome?!" when someone pulls out a gun blade or spike-laden body suit add a sense of momentary bemusement to the proceedings. Even more amusing is the baffling acting job by such established talents as Russell Crowe and Lucy Lui. Crowe, in particular, is given numerous scenes to mutter through with so much bad dialog only a man's man like Russ could survive it, let along have a career after he was done.For example: he looks at a bevy of prostitutes on his bed and says, "Let's pretend to be Catholic and see which one of you is the heretic." Lui doesn't fare much better in her rallying speech to an army of ninja-whores where she appears to have been replaced by a store mannequin. It's still better than sitting through her performance in "Charlie's Angels", but it's still terrible.With all this cheese on display, it's a shame I didn't have more fun with this one. There are a few decent fight scenes and a handful of nice directorial flourishes (including some interesting slow motion), but that hardly balances out the manic delirium of the constant editing that renders several scenes completely ineffective. While there are numerous technical flaws and inconsistent production values, "Man With the Iron Fists" truly fails because the story and characters never develop past being clumps of winks and nostalgic nudges to older--and much more entertaining--films.1.5 out of 4