War

ACTION/THRILLER

War, as Edwin Starr once noted, is good for absolutely nothing, particularly when it’s a non-event of a smack-down between cockney tough-guy Jason Statham and celebrated martial arts star Jet Li. Pop promo director Phillip G Atwell somehow manages to submerge two of the most personable action heroes imaginable into a murky, forgettable Triad crime drama that doesn’t even have any action sequences worth describing.

Conventional casting nullifies the stars’ appeal – Li plays a master criminal, while Statham is the FBI man sent to bring him down for killing his partner. As clichéd as it sounds, War doesn’t even put its marquee names in the same frame until the final, anticlimactic scene, and marks a notable drop in quality in the output of usually reliable stars. The cinematic equivalent of a clip joint, Atwell’s film promises a bit of mindless action but provides only jaw-jaw rather than war-war.

General release from Fri 28 Sep.