Looking for a historical actioner? A blood & guts period piece set a few millennium back? Hordes of faceless combatants set for slaughter while titled nobles feed family grudges via love, war & rights of succession? Go East, young man; Go East, and grow up with the Asian film market. Hong Kong, Korea & Japan with a dozen for each made in the West. (And of those, half artsy fare like Robert Eggers’ THE NORTHMAN/’22.) So how does HAWK fit in? Western financed, though writer/director John Wynn of Asian descent, and a story all over the place. Tired of village-destroying raids, clans of 13th Century Euro-Caucasian settlers move to the Carpathian Mountains to resettle and form new units and one big protection racket to share in. If they could only get along among themselves! What could truly pull them together? A marriage across family lines? An attack from without. You’re both right! Mongols sent on orders from Genghis Khan are threatening, and a son from one of the clans (one of two beefy, boychik brothers) has fallen in love with the daughter of the one Carpathian baron playing both sides of the East/West fence. (No actual fences, instead, river borders which turns out to be a major plot device.) Hey, this is sounding pretty good! Don’t be fooled. Between the Pan Pipes on the soundtrack; the tasteful Earth-toned color scheme; director Wynn’s lack of close-action chops; the indifferently handled digital effects, a lack of acting skills (rising in reverse proportion to looks); and a last act that’s basically The 300 Spartans for Dummies; this tight-budget epic likely to send you back to the East.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: John Woo put out one of the more entertaining examples of the form in the two-parter RED CLIFF/’08 - ‘09) https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/chi-bi-red-cliff-2008.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/chi-bi-xia-jue-zhan-tian-xia-red-cliff.html
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