A Brilliant Conflict

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

When the movie start you realize something is off... a king and one his soldier, in medieval outfits? Then you see Jet Fighters attacking there country... What? LOL. Then they mention the united nation won't help them... which is hard to follow and finally the warrior start his quest to help the princess before the assassin reach her. Its really hard to get in and the movie does not help you whatsoever.The fights scene are not numerous and are pretty boring in the first half of the movie. There is not even gunfights too much either. All you hear is Alexander Wraith dubbing (wich i don't understand why, since in the outtakes he seem to speak good English) and his long and boring monologue.I actually liked Lalaine tough that i knew just a bit from Buffy(as Chloe), she seem genuine in the damsel in distress and i felt a bit for her. But in the first half all the rest is forgettable...In the second half it get a bit more interesting, by sadly this is when i turned down the movie the first time watching it. I was bored... I came back 1 week later to finish it before selling it at the pawnshop but then it become a bit more interesting. The twist at the end is a good idea, it was just badly executed trough the whole movie, the final showdown is decent but could had been so much better. In any case a better second half for sure.But its looking at the bloopers and outtakes i had the most fun, i mean the actors and crew seem to have fun and its actually a good time watching them. Also sad to read about MR Miyagi's last day on a film set... The crew seem very interested in the movie and believe in it. Its too bad the final product ended not too good.I think Gail Kim could play a tough chick again in a movie, they would just need to choose better outfits for her(she wear a skirt in this, hard to take an assassin serious in that outfit) cause she got a face for it and a presence.In any case, my final verdict would be that if you like martial arts forget about this movie, there is very minimal of it, and only give it a go if you don't mind slow development stories... Its not a very good movie, but not the worst movie ever like some pointed out.

So my wife goes online and the films rated 4/5 stars on our local rental site, so she sends me out to get it. I wish I'd bothered to read the stars names. If I'd known Eric Roberts was the leading star, I would have never picked it up.After a confusingly stupid intro that would be an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has read a menu at Wendy's, ten minutes into the movie, we still have no idea what's going on. Other notable points, sometimes the video looks like it's shot with a cheap handycam, the sound is awful when they're inside, the acting is painful...there's basically zero plot, fine, I can deal with it (I knew it was an action movie when I rented it) , I'll fast forward to the action... 5 minutes fast forwarding at 30x speed.. no action... another 2 minutes, finally! an action scene! Back to normal speed, and... what a disappointment. There's no real fight, just some shadowing stuff and then a guy jumps through a candy glass door. Wow... take that Ninja assassin!! 30 seconds later, I'm off the couch and back on my way to the video store to demand a refund or replacement. The rental clerk says, we usually don't do exchanges.. I explain how bad it was to him and that I only watched about 15 minutes before turning it off, so he makes an exception. He says next time just say it's scratched or something. I think to myself, If I'd scratched the DVD, I would have been doing the world a huge favor!!

I really like Gail Kim. I think she is one of the sexiest, as well as most technically talented, female pro-wrestlers of her generation. So I have been waiting for this film for years (just remember that Pat Morita died in 2005 and do the math to realize how long its release has been delayed). When I finally started watching it, I thought the only possible reason for the very bad reviews it got was its unfortunate retitling from "Royal Kill" to "Ninja's Creed" on the DVD cover (it has nothing to do with ninjas). The first half of the movie plays like a low-budget but still slick variation on the "Terminator" myth: a mysterious noble warrior sent to protect the last hope of oppressed people from an unstoppable assassin whose only mission is to eliminate both. Sure, they botched Gail Kim's first action scene, the attack on Lalaine's house, but her next fight, against Alexander Wraith and some security guards, is a nice set-piece, where she gets to use some of her trademark wrestling moves. And then....the first big twist comes. The good thing about this twist is that you won't see it coming. The bad things are that a) it cancels out the movie up to that point, b) it makes no sense. But even if you're willing to go along with it, more similar twists soon follow until the film collapses completely into incoherence. If writer-director Babar Ahmed had focused more on trying to deliver a movie similar to the one suggested by the DVD cover, it probably would have turned out better than this overambitious mess. *1/2 out of 4.

Starts out as normal Hollywood movie. A hero. Villain. Girl needs to be saved. You're eating your popcorn thinking I know exactly whats going to happen and then WHAM. You've never ever seen this kind of ending before. I don't know how they got away with leaving that ending cause its brutal and its nothing like you could ever imagine. It has a lot of good and evil, Yin and Yang kind of philosophical stuff to it which I liked. The music is really good. I also liked that the famous actors who are used to playing bad guys play good guys and the famous actors who play good guys are really nasty villains.