Review of Versus

From the get-go, you'll know that this is a film that relies almost solely on its style and its visual slickness. Low budget in the good sense, Versus resembles early Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson works (Bad Taste springs primarily to mind). It combines good-humored gore with Luc Besson-ish wide lens shots and quirkiness (the characters here reminded me of The Boondock Saints in their flamboyance), along with some very creative martial arts sequences. At some point, in fact, it gets so over-the-top it starts to play out more like a Stephen Chow movie. It then jumps from Night of the Living Dead to Mortal Kombat to Highlander, making a stop or two at X-Men along the way. This eastern/western mix works surprisingly well and the result is highly entertaining, if you enjoy this kind of thing. Just don't go looking for any depth, causality, plot logic, or plot altogether, really. The few dialogue scenes are a mess (excluding the one that takes place when everything turns an orange shade, about an hour into the film), and often serve only as a backdrop for canted steadicam close-ups and multi-character Mexican standoffs. This is not high brow cinema, it's high octane. And it was perfectly fine by me. It is when the film discards some of its humor that it begins to lose its charm, but even then, the spectacularly choreographed martial arts kept me entertained. I would be interested in seeing "The Ultimate Versus" – a director's cut that's ten minutes longer and has CGI special effects, according to IMDb.

P.S. There are few things I hate more than a dubbed movie, but in this case (like in Shaolin Soccer), I found that at certain scenes (particularly ones involving "the runt" – the wacky short guy), the English dubbing actually adds to the absurdity of the film. Anyway, the DVD offers both the American and the original Japanese dialogue tracks.