This looks awesome.
I’ve seen many kung-fu films with the RZA in attendance at the various Quentin Tarantino film festivals, so there’s something that feels completely organic and normal about RZA finally making his directorial debut with a movie that looks like a non-stop totally mad mash-up of genres and styles.
I love it when someone gets a chance to indulge their passions like this. Good or bad, the films that come from this kind of madness are films that are deeply felt, films that someone cares about. When “Kill Bill Vol. 1” came out, the thing that struck me first about it was just how much joy there was in each and every fight scene. You could almost hear Tarantino standing behind the camera, cackling after every moment, after every stunt that went right, after every gushing blood geyser.
There’s that same sense of giddy abandon in the footage we see in this first red-banded trailer for “The Man With The Iron Fist,” and I’m so happy to see Russell Crowe in the middle of this madness. I like him a lot on film, but I haven’t really loved the choices he’s made in recent years. I wish he could have more fun, and that’s what this looks like… fun. Big silly crazy bloody fun.
It also looks like it’s going to be fairly non-stop. I’ve got no idea what the film’s actually about beyond the broad strokes of revenge and fighting, but it looks like this is along the lines of the daffy “The Good The Bad and The Weird” but with a real strong “Master Of The Flying Guillotine” vibe as well. This trailer, which premiered at IGN today, is very red-band, and there’s a great shot involving an eyeball at the end of the thing that probably earned them that red-band, and it looks like they’re going embrace that R-rating with glee.
It’s also a nice change of pace for Eli Roth, who seems like he’s gearing up for a very different second phase to his career. He’s just as big a part of this one as the RZA, and that friendship is one that we’ve seen take root over several years worth of festivals and screenings and hanging out, and to see it take form in a film like this is not what I would have expected, but it feels totally appropriate.
I was already interested in this, but now I’m downright excited.
“The Man With The Iron Fist” will be in theaters later this year.