#642 – Jiu Jitsu (2020)

Jiu Jitsu (2020)

Film review #642

Director: Dimitri Logothetis

SYNOPSIS: Jake Barnes awakens at a military outpost in Burma with no memory. He is broken out of the base by a group of jiu jitsu fighters who tell him that he is one of them, and they are tasked with defeating an alien invader that visits Earth every six years, and who will destroy it if they fail to defeat him…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Jiu Jitsu is a 2020 sci-fi film. A secret order of jiu jitsu fights must off an alien invader that visits every six years through a portal in a Burmese temple, and if they fail, the alien will destroy the world. That’s basically the whole plot, and is essentially Predator with some martial arts. However, it’s complicated by all sorts of nonsense that doesn’t provide any world-building or interesting lore, but just a heap of stuff that distracts and bloats out the runtime. Having Jake lose his memory makes no sense and clearly serves no reason other than to have the plot explained to him for the viewer’s purpose. The martial arts itself is fine, but it often feels so forced, in the sense that the situations people are in don’t seem to call for specific actions, and it just doesn’t flow right. Copious amounts of dialogue try to say things or put the pieces of the world together, but serve to ultimately just make things more bloated. So much in this film is unnecessary fluff that doesn’t go anywhere or develop into anything.

The characters are all one dimensional and uninteresting. Even the ones that are obviously trying to fill certain roles (comic relief etc.) fall flat. Nicholas Cage doing his typical crazy act doesn’t really work here either. For a martial arts movie, there’s a lot of stuff that actually gets in the way of the martial arts (none of it is actually jiu jitsu, by the way). The film sometimes opts for a comic book style transition between scene, which somewhat makes sense, but doesn’t commit to it for more than a third of the film. For some reason as well, there’s portions of fight scene near the beginning of the film that are shot from a first-person perspective, which makes no cinematic sense, and is completely at odds with the rest of the film: again, if you’re going to use one of these techniques, then at least commit to it. I honestly can’t fathom what the vision or direction is in this movie: it’s just stuff thrown in front of the camera, and any attempt to justify it somehow makes everything worse. It’s not even something you can just mindlessly enjoy either, it’s just too baffling and inconsistent to not pay attention to. It’s not that the cast is bad either; they’re just given nothing to do or to work with. I honestly can’t work out what this movie’s vision is or what it is trying to accomplish, and obviously no one else could either: the film was an absolute bomb at the box office. Jiu Jitsu is a poor attempt at martial arts and sci-fi where nothing hits home.