Scott Mann’s “The Tournament” looks and feels like an ‘90s action movie, the kind that relies on an overly simplified premise that is supposed to pass for a storyline, but is really just an excuse for a whole lot of wanton bloodshed. Mind you, not that that’s a bad thing. In this case, it just feels a little bit overdone, and after a while all the shooting, eccentric characters, and violence dulls the senses and makes you question the meaning. Naaaaaaah. Kidding, kidding. It just gets tedious after a while, that’s all, which is something you don’t want an audience to say especially when things (and people) are blowing up every other minute in your movie. In fact, if not for Robert Carlyle as a drunkard priest, the film feels more like 90 minutes of bullet squib practice for an actual movie that hasn’t been greenlit for production yet.

“The Tournament” has one of those premise that fits on a movie poster: every 7 years, in a small, clueless town somewhere in the world, 30 of the world’s best assassins are brought together to compete in a kill-or-be-killed tournament, whereby the last one standing wins a cool $10 million. Meanwhile, your usual assortment of rich fat cats bet on the game from the comforts of the tournament holder’s operation center, which in this case consists of exactly two rooms – the one where two tech guys mindlessly type on keyboards but somehow manages to run the whole show anyway, and a dark, shady looking boardroom with big screen TVs. The tournament is run by a gentleman name Powers (Liam Cunningham), a man who is apparently so rich and so well-connected that all his tournaments, and all the mayhem and death that results, are easily swept under the rug or blamed on terrorists.
It would be unfair to say that I was surprised “The Tournament” didn’t blow me away, even though it did do everything it could to blow everyone and everything else away onscreen. The film, and director Scott Mann, seems to have some original ideas going in, and the setup, while not novel, is a good excuse for some explosive action, which the film does deliver on a pretty consistent basis. For action junkies, the movie delivers some juicy bits, many of them absurdly over the top, which I suspect was the intention. It’s not a bad movie, as long as you know what you’re getting into. Every now and then I was expecting Jean-Claude Van Damme to show up, because this seems exactly like the kind of movie he would have made in the ‘90s – loud, excessive, and over-the-top.