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RATING:   
SINGAPORE: In "The Tournament", the world's greatest assassins gather once every seven years in a random, unsuspecting town for a battle royale to the death.
Organised, watched and wagered upon by rich, unscrupulous men, these assassins will use whatever means necessary to kill or be killed, and win a cash prize and the title of world's deadliest assassin.
If that sounds like a video game, or an unoriginal amalgamation of other B-grade movies, well it's because it essentially is. There is nothing original - or watchable - about "The Tournament". We've seen every stock character, every death, every weapon, every plot twist and pretty much the entire movie before.
As a straight-to-DVD release in the United States, you wouldn't be surprised to find that "The Tournament" is chock-full of violence and vulgarity. There are buckets of blood emptied, hundreds of bullet casings riddled across the screen and thousands of pointless words of dialogue uttered with no meaning.
Every other sentence starts with an F-bomb and ends with another derogatory swear word. The few scenes of "real emotion" are delivered with enough eye-rolling ham (from the actors) and cheese (from the writers) to make a pretty hard-to-swallow sandwich.
There are even a few recognisable actors here, each playing requisite roles for us to root for or against their success.
Ving Rhames is the returning champion out for revenge, Kelly Hu is an assassin trained in deadly martial arts, Robert Carlyle is the unwitting priest caught in the middle and Ian Somerhalder is the psychotic bad guy.
The mastermind (Liam Cunningham) looks and speaks as insidiously as one would expect a wealthy mastermind who organises such an event to be. So unless you like your violence pointless and over-the-top, move right along.
- TODAY/sh
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