The Warrior's Way

A taciturn Oriental assassin, a hideously scarred Kentucky Colonel, a cowardly African-American midget, a bouncy gee-willikers cowgirl, an unusually expressive baby, a parade of bumbling circus folk and one confused-looking Oscar winner doing a spot-on impersonation of Tom Waits make up the cast of this deeply strange, CGI heavy, New Zealand-made, Wild West-set kung-fu cowboy concoction. Having trained all his life to become the Greatest Swordsman in the World, Yang (Dong-gun Jan) turns his back on his clan and flees to America with one-year-old enemy princess April. Holing up in a remote Monument Valley town populated, for no readily apparent reason, by the remnants of an abandoned circus, Yang waits for his old allies to track him down, filling in time by romancing knife-thrower Lynne (Kate Bosworth), shooting the breeze with washed-up gunsmith Ron (Geoffrey Rush) and getting into bloody scraps with vengeful military sex maniac The Colonel (Danny Huston).

It’s all pretty much as bizarre as it sounds: Rush drinks and drawls, Jan frowns and stalks and Huston drools and barks, while the teeth-gratingly awful Bosworth appears to be channelling Jessie from the ‘Toy Story’ movies, pigtails and all. The cut-price CGI backdrops never manage to look more convincing than the average console game, undercutting what might have been an agreeably bonkers cowboys-vs-clowns-vs-ninjas finale, and Huston’s leering rapist villain feels jawdroppingly inappropriate. But fans of the bizarre will find much to enjoy here, and the film has a strong chance of achieving a so-weird-it’s-good cult rep.