Invincible (2001)

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I haven't seen but 10 min of the movie, but i've seen enough. It had potential, you say? Well, let me break it down for you.Os, formerly one of the "Shadowmen" (who were "exiled to the Earth for committing crimes against cosmic evolution") is accosted by the "White Warrior" and converted by the "Light". Now a soldier of good, he must fight the bad guys ("Shadowmen"), with the aid of the "Elements", who have come into the possession of some "Tablet" and threaten to destroy the Earth.If you're older than 6 and that sounds like potential... Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you're in a serious need of a life.The plot's simply inane. I'm all for a little bit of the good ole Good vs. Evil type of action, but not when it seems to have been written by a slightly retarded kid who's never been out of the house and is fed a steady diet of New Age, Matrix and X-Box. And whose only layer is Absolutely Superficial. I mean, layered "adult fairy tales" are one thing - obvious, jejune, insultingly simple stories for the slow on the uptake are another. Add to that idiotic electronic "score" (compliments of Casio defaults), cheap "effects", laughable studio scenery and lighting, wanna-be Matrix/kung-fu fights, amateurish camera-work, and a lot of "profound", solemnly-delivered lines containing a lot of capitalized nouns ("the War is within", "Freedom is inside all life"...) and you get a mess that's so bad it ain't even funny. No, seriously. This is a whole new level.

Having read the bad reviews prior to seeing this movie I was prepared to stop seeing it in case it became unbearable. Well it wasn't unbearable, of course it wasn't good either. It lies somewhere in the middle ground and it is saved by the fact that it presents a fairy tale.The acting isn't great since the characters are out of proportions and fail to present something believable. OK, so this is a fairy tale, you don't have to be sarcastic about it!!! I believe that the actors where quite distant from their roles since they were playing characters from a fairy tale. That isn't a prerequisite though...What I really enjoyed was the narration by Billy Zane's deep voice. It's a powerful element of the movie.It's a movie that you should only see if you can't find something better to rent and you are bored of searching through the selves!

This movie wasn't as good as it could have been. The potential was there, with a decent plot and a few good actors, but it was just not done well.The idea of a group of different individuals putting their differences aside and coming together to achieve a common goal is not new, but it can be done well. Here it was not. I didn't watch the movie for the story, which was good as it was not real good. The whole "love will overcome all" is a good idea, but Os runs it into the ground to the point that he comes across as one of those fake happy lovely-dovey Mormon missionary types that makes most people nauseous.Judging from the commercials and the packaging, I expected this to be more of a martial arts movie. Sadly, where most martial arts movies use the story to connect the fight scenes, this movie apparently forgot that it was a martial arts flick and concentrated on a really weak story at the expense of the fighting. One could count the number of fight scenes in this movie on the fingers of one hand and still have plenty of fingers left. The fights that it did have weren't all that great, either. The fighting relied a lot on wires, which is okay for a fairy-tale or a wuxia movie, but it just looked silly here. Also, it wasn't hard to tell that the actors trained just long enough to pull this movie's few fight scenes off. The actions weren't crisp or particularly fast, and they tried to hide all of this via flickering lighting, jerky camera shots and slow-motion. It was just not good from a martial arts perspective.Unfortunately, most of this 90 minute snoozer is only worth fast-forwarding through, which I did for most of the last thirty minutes, and I'm kicking myself for not fast-forwarding earlier through the totally inane temptation scene. Fast-forwarding through a movie is something I almost never do, but I couldn't take it after an hour of drivel. This movie may have worked as a children's cartoon or some sort of kids live-action movie, but not as a movie aimed at a post-adolescent audience. Mel Gibson I can forgive for being involved in this silly movie, but Jet Li ought to know better. Hopefully he did it as a favor or lost a bet or something.Bottom line - avoid this one.

Someone else here compared it to Battlefield Earth. This wasn't nearly as good.I rented this based on the box copy, which made it look interesting. I got up to the dream sequence with Ohs and Slade arguing philosophy like two slightly drunk college sophomores before I turned it off.The movie starts with a hackneyed "conversion" fight, all-too-short "gathering of the heroes" sequences, inexplicable bicycle rides, quasi-Buddhist/Christian philosophy, bad dialog, bad editing and bad acting from everyone but Billy Zane who came off as rather natural despite the unnaturalness of the part.You will watch and be amazed that the film got made and how Mel Gibson and Jet Li ever became associated with it. You will keep your finger on the "stop" button of the remote control yet be unable to make yourself press it out of sheer morbid curiosity and you will beg for death before the end!Seriously. Go rent something else. For your own sake.