Once in a while you go to see a movie and you really hope to be
surprised and find that the movie is better than it looked in the
advertisements. But then there are movies like
”
Cradle 2 the Grave,
”
currently playing at Premiere Cinemas.
Once in a while you go to see a movie and you really hope to be surprised and find that the movie is better than it looked in the advertisements. But then there are movies like “Cradle 2 the Grave,” currently playing at Premiere Cinemas.
This is a lackluster movie with a lot of fighting but no kick – a 100-minute release from Warner Brothers Pictures that probably should have gone straight to video and saved a lot of people a lot of trouble. The sad part is I’ll never get back that wasted hour and a half of my life.
It’s not even so much that this movie is bad, it’s just not much of anything. Your emotions never get too high or too low. I just never really got much of a feeling for the characters or the plot of this film.
I think that’s inexcusable for a director like Andrzej Bartkowiak, who has made good movies such as “The Devil’s Advocate,” “The Mirror has two Faces” and “Lethal Weapon 4” to misuse one of the hottest martial arts stars on the screen today, that being Jet Li (“The One,” “Lethal Weapon 4” and “Kiss of the Dragon”).
With his lightning-fast moves and solid screen presence, Li can light up a screen, if you make full use of his talent. Apparently, Bartkowiak and the rest of the filmmaking team at Warner Brothers did not have the same kind of faith in Li’s star potential because they keep him reigned in throughout much of the movie.
In fact, for most of the early fight scenes of the movie, Li’s character is fighting only with one hand. For a reason that’s never explained in the movie, Li’s character fights with his left hand in his pants pocket.
In this movie’s defense, there are some sparkling stunts, including one where Li climbs down the side of a high-rise apartment complex by literally dropping himself one story at a time, and some superior fight scenes.
One of the few other bright spots is the comic relief by Anthony Anderson (“Kangaroo Jack, “Barbershop” and “Me, Myself and Irene”) and Tom Arnold (“True Lies,” “Exit Wounds” and “McHale’s Navy”).
For those who watch this action-adventure, make sure you watch the credits at the end, which feature a funny ad-libbed conversation between Anderson and Arnold’s characters as they make fun of the movie and pick on Bartkowiak, who just let the cameras roll.
The plot centers around rapper DMX, who plays Tony Fait, a master thief who executes a nearly perfect jewel heist when he latches on to what he believes are black diamonds. But while he’s getting away with the goods, Jet Li, who plays a Taiwanese government agent named Su, gets hot on his trail in an attempt to recover the rare black stones.
What Fait doesn’t realize is the stones belong to a high-level Chinese crime figure named Ling. When Ling discovers that Fait has the stones, he kidnaps Fait’s daughter to force him to turn over the stones.
Before Fait gets a chance to decide whether to turn over the stones, another criminal group steals them from where Fait had hidden them. Fait and Su are forced to work together to get the stones, save his daughter and, if possible, stop Ling.
This movie is filled with graphic language and violence that is unsuitable for children or sensitive viewers.
