Mark Reviews Movies: JIU JITSU

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 19, 2020

Working with nothing but clichés and a wholly ripped-off premise, Jiu Jitsu has little to do but run around in circles—sometimes, pretty literally. Stop me if you've heard this one: An alien from another world has come to Earth to hunt a group of well-trained warriors in the jungle. It's like some kind of extraterrestrial predator, although one imagines screenwriters Dimitri Logothetis, who also directed, and Jim McGrath would prefer that particular word not be used too often in any description of their movie. Some folks are quite lawsuit-happy, after all.

If one can get past the obvious influence on this story, there really isn't much else to hold one's interest or discuss. Well, there is the detail that the alien or one of its predecessors, which invade Earth every six years to hunt and fight a group of warriors, taught human beings the martial art of jiu-Jitsu so many centuries ago.

The alien or aliens wanted a fair fight with skilled combatants, since their culture apparently relies on concepts like honor. One wonders just how fair and honorable this alien or these aliens actually are, when they have pistols in their wrists, hidden and retractable blades, and the ability to essentially teleport at will.

This story takes its time to reveal the real threat here, and in the meantime, we're introduced to Jake (Alain Moussi), who's first seen running through a jungle in Burma or Myanmar from a collection of speeding, lethal discs. Wounded and thrown from a cliff into the water, he ends up with amnesia and in the custody of an American military team, investigating the sudden spike in radiation levels in the area.

The rest of the story is basically the action equivalent of shampoo directions: exposition, action, repeat. Jake is questioned by Myra (Marie Avgeropoulos), a soldier with Army Intelligence, and rescued by the mysterious Kueng (Tony Jaa).

The resulting action sequence, of Jake's ally infiltrating the camp and taking out a whole bunch of soldiers, is theoretically impressive. Logothetis captures the whole affair in a one-take, following the skilled fighter as he leaps, punches, kicks, dodges, and tosses every which way through the military base. It's pretty elaborate in terms of how the camera moves across and over various terrains and obstacles, but it's also undermined by choreography that looks more like friendly sparring, the tendency for opponents to take on the intruder one at a time, and plenty of repeating stunts.

Indeed, the entire sequence is repeated again, although this time with Jake freed and doing the same things we just his ally doing. None of this gets much better. The whole movie just keeps repeating itself, as it tries to distract us from how hollow and silly it is with as much action as possible.

We meet more members of Jake's team, who have been training to fight the alien invader for most of their lives. They don't really matter, except that they can and do fight, taking turns battling soldiers trying to retrieve Jake into custody (They do, somehow without his teammates noticing, which brings us right back where the story began).

There's also the alien, which looks very much like a muscular man in a plain, gray rubber suit (Some other obvious quirks include stone structures that wobble when struck and others that explode into wooden chips when impacted). It also fights these characters one at a time, because, as much as they talk about coming up with a plan to defeat the creature before it kills them or wipes out all of humanity if they fail to fight it honorably, none of human warriors thinks that coming at the alien two or more at a time might help.

Nicolas Cage, by the way, turns up in several scenes as Wylie, the group's mentor, who explains the rules and mythology of the alien and its plan. Other than his shifting costume choices (wearing a robe in his first appearance and then looking like a hippie for the rest of the movie), he's here to recite exposition with as much seriousness and conviction as it deserves.

Otherwise, the movie amounts to a series of fights. That might have be fine, but Jiu Jitsu approaches all of these battles with the passion of a rehearsal (save for when Jaa takes on the alien with some much-needed and much-appreciated gusto) and a sense of déjà vu.

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