Too much of everything

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The Gauntlet. A handful of strangers, all of whom have previously killed, find themselves trapped in a deadly and mysterious building. It soon becomes a fight for survival with challenging Biblical riddles to solve along the way. The Running Man and Saw are two movies that sprung to mind, with added Satanic references. There's plenty of violence and action to help pass it's relatively short running time, bit of suspense too. The ending is a bit hard to swallow though. Ba Ling, who was 47 at the time, looks fantastic. A reasonable if instantly forgettable time filler.

THE GAUNTLET is a would-be horror/adventure film that seems to have been shot in somebody's basement. Certainly the film has about 10% of the kind of lighting you normally see in a B-movie and as it's a single location flick too it just consists of five actors hanging around in the dark while somebody feeds them their dialogue. Much is made of conflict within the group but if this is trying to be one of those 'deadly gameshow' type films then it fails miserably. Due to the lack of incident and plot it just goes on and on and on, hugely boring to sit through. The reliable Bai Ling appears in a supporting role but even she can't save this waste-of-time movie.

A movie supposedly based on Catholic doctrine featuring East Asians who may not know such things.The clues are pictures that we can't see properly or mumbled bits of lore we can not hear properly.Things keep happening for no reason and everyone suddenly changes character. Its like kids playing a game,changing and making up rules as they go along,but without the charm of that.

I'm sure there are some people who will be convinced this movie contains some sort of hidden truths, but I'm not. There's almost no plot, not much dialogue and we learn very little about the characters - worse, we don't care about any of them anyway. What little plot there is, as it turns out, ends up with several big holes in it. The ending takes place in the last 5 minutes, because the writer obviously just ran out of ideas (or paper). It's trudge, trudge, trudge for 75 minutes, then a disappointing ending so devoid of anything useful that the viewer just ends up with nothing. If someone had suggested to me that this movie might end this way, I'd think he was kidding.This movie was showing on HBO one Sunday against all of the infomercials, and I got curious. I thought it might be a fun little action flick, but an old Jackie Chan movie would have been a hundred times more entertaining.