Jiu Jitsu (2020)

2020 R 102 Minutes

Every six years, an ancient order of jiu-jitsu fighters joins forces to battle a vicious race of alien invaders. But when a celebrated war hero goes down in defeat, the fate of the planet and manki...

Overall Rating

3 / 10

Verdict: So-So

User Review

d_riptide

2 / 10

If theres one thing people love about Nicolas Cage, it’s his infamously popular over-the-top-acting prowess: it’s allowed audiences all over the world to drown themselves in laughter over his overly dramatic or just rather bizarre segments of entertainment. So I was hoping to get something scarcely along those lines when I saw Jiu Jitsu with Grandma. To an extent, I was right. The film offered a very weird and trippy escapist sci-fi adventure and meta martial arts movie all in one, trying to defy and even satirize the conventional Kung-fu movie tappings you would expect to find here while Cage chewed up the scenery whenever he was allowed. Not to mention the choreography was sturdy enough for what was presented.

But that’s about it; this was one of the weirdest experiences I’ve had to go through this year and not in a good way.

It has one or two inventive shots but the rest of the cinematography is subordinate to the absolutely atrocious editing that hacks the film up to pieces so badly to where it jumps from action sequence to exposition with little to no time to breath. Not to mention, they fall completely flat in general when butchered by the excessive slow motion or distracting POV shots. It’s usage of CGI and the cheapness it entails is really embarrassing while special effects in general compiles of ass and gravy, the main character has a severe lack of charisma along with every other cast member whose name isn’t Nic Cage, Tony Jaa or even Eddie Steeples, none of the characters have any emphasis or depth to make them engaging only existing to dump buckets of exposition that leads to nothing and the plot is a complete waste of time. It doesn’t even get started until after 50 minutes of filler and it banks itself out on a mythology that is way too disjointed and tame to be worth an impulse-rent, too silly to be enjoyed with a straight face and too lazy to be so-bad-it’s-good.

This movie doesnt really know whether it wants to be a samurai, Power Rangers or Predator ripoff and it doesn’t give off the impression that it even cares about what it wants.

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