The Purifiers (2005)

"the Purifiers" is a movie with practically nothing to recommend it.The direction is sloppy and it never overcomes its low budget. The script is derivative of other more successful films without any understanding of the elements which made the originals successful.Performances are pretty amateurish,with Dominic Monaghan phoning in his performance.Editing is awful.All of these faults could be overlooked if the martial arts were any good but the fight scenes ( which if I recall correctly all take place in slow motion) being ineptly staged and filmed.There are better movies than this in any genre you care to name.Avoid.

To say that this filmed sucked would be an understatement. This film was dreadful. Supposedly, this took place in the future...though I'm not sure when in the future. There was never any mention of the year. There was a little cheesy acting and a lot of unnecessary martial arts. Apparently, in the future, we will resort back to ancient Asian fighting tactics. No weapons but our hands and feet. There were several times where there would be two different sequences taking place on split screen, which makes it impossible to see everything that's happening. And, again, I must mention the unnecessary martial arts. The story had no structure to it, so to fill in the void...fight sequence. The acting was mediocre at best. The story was completely absent. The fighting was crap. All in all...2/10.

It is not as bad as I make it sound with the summary. To be honest, I rented this movie strictly because Dominic Monaghan was in it. I had read some bad reviews and was expecting a less than mediocre film. All the same, Dom had looked good in the previews and I figured that if nothing else Dom would be pretty. Dom was pretty. He also did a really good job playing the bad guy. At the end of the movie both my friend and I (we're both big Dom fans) were waiting for somebody to kill him and they did, thank you very much. He is not the main character, but I loved the main character, John. Gordon Alexander did a fantabulous job portraying John as the man who will always stick to what he knows is right and fight what is wrong. There is something of an artistic way this film is done and sometimes it works...other times it doesn't. I still like it a lot and plan on buying on it. It is not what most people would expect when they see the preview, but it is worth a watch.

I had a urge to watch this film since I saw the awful trailer for it online. I know, I know, I am a glutton for punishment but I have always enjoyed the laughable badness of B-movies so decided to give it a go, especially since "Lost" actor Dominic Monaghan is in it.How can I describe my experience watching it? I was bored, I laughed quite a bit, I got confused when action jumped to strange places, and I thought, "What the hell was this director thinking?" as the film's end titles rolled with the awful music accompanying them.I won't even want to mention Monaghan's performance in this film because I am sure this is a film he hopes disappears off his resume, especially now he is on "Lost". I will just say that he seemed to do the best he could in this bad movie and leave it at that.This film was a big old mess. It dragged in the action which is bad for a martial arts film. The fight scenes were awful, the dialog was awful, the John character spouting poetic at the beginning and end of the film was awful, and even the clothing was awful. It was a bad rip-off of the movie "The Warriors" simple as that....and a bad attempt to copy the film.I did think that the film had beautiful lighting and the colours were very beautiful as well. High definition digital can be beautiful to look at. Too bad the movie wasn't good itself.I tortured myself twice because after I watched the film through, I thought "What the hell was the director thinking?" so watched the film with his commentary. It seems he is fully aware he is making a bad B movie and that is what he set out to do. He was so earnest about it that I found myself liking bits of the movie after he talking about the "Whys" of them. This is why I gave the movie a "3" in rating. The director did do his very best to make a bad movie with the limited budget he had.But, it is a bad movie so if you don't want to be bored, and don't find amusement in awful films, give this film a pass and rent something better.