A good movie

Honestly, I had no idea what to expect from this movie but I still wanted to check it out. Indeed, on one hand, you had Chiwetel Ejiofor, probably one of the best actors around nowadays, but also, Tim Allen, probably one of the most underwhelming actors I have ever seen. Fortunately, Tim Allen showed up for maybe only 10 minutes so that wasn't enough to ruin this movie (he was still miscast though and I would have rather had someone like Bruce Willis instead). Basically, it is a rather intriguing movie about martial arts, especially jiu-jitsu, which wasn't something I would have expected from David Mamet but the guy has been doing this sport for already 6 years at the time so that explains a lot. On top of that, a third of the characters were Brazilian for no apparent reason so that was a rather odd mix. The main issue, in my opinion, is that with a running time of barely 100 minutes, there was just too many characters and intrigues to carry and, at the end of the day, half of it didn't make much sense. Still, Mamet has managed to create a rather fascinating world and Ejiofor was completely convincing and spellbinding to behold so I think it is definitely worth a look.

7/10