Cradle 2 the Grave

2/28/03 - Review

The producer/director team of Joel Silver and Andrjez Bartkowiak, who brought you Romeo Must Die and Exit Wounds, are back again for their third time together in the action packed, black diamond caper flick Cradle 2 the Grave.  This duo also brought back again the likes of Jet Li, rapper DMX, and Mr. funny man, Anthony Anderson.  DMX plays Tony Fait, a vault robber that is always looking for the perfect score.  Fait and his crew, which also features Anthony Anderson as Tommy, hit up a highly secured vault with a modified rocket to tear off the vault door panel.  What the got out of the heist, was 50 black diamonds that are priceless since nobody knows what they are.  As soon as they get out with the diamonds, everybody and their grandma wants to get their hands on them.  Jet Li plays Su, a Taiwanese government agent who is on a mission to return the diamonds back to Taiwan and stop his former partner, Ling, from getting his hands on them.  Fait gives the stones to his friend, played by Tom Arnold but he gets mugged and a top crime lord takes possession.  Everybody soon finds out that the stones are a plutonium weapon that is the most powerful thing every created, which coincidental was created by the Taiwanese.  Fait and Su must work together to get back the stones, and Fait’s most cherished possession, his daughter, who was kidnapped by Ling.    

If you managed to see Romeo Must Die and Exit Wounds, then one would expect the third movie with the same team to be fairly decent as well.  Instead, what we got was a big turd in terms of action/kung-fu movies.  I have to say that I was very disappointed with the outcome of this movie.  I was expecting a kick ass action flick, instead what I got was a watered down caper movie that had way too many things going on at once.  I have to say that the last thirty or minutes or so was like a Star Wars movie.  What I mean by this is that there are two or three different things taking place at the same time, which translates to constant changing scenes on the screen.  Sure the action was good, but not when there are three different fights going on at once.  It’s lame if you ask me and hard to keep track of.  As far as Jet Li and his martial arts moves are concerned, they were pretty much lacking with his diminished screen time.  What were there are just rehashed fights from other movies.  Tom Arnold and Anthony Anderson play the usual comic relief which doesn’t detract at all from the movie, but it couldn’t really save it.  DMX is a decent actor but I didn’t know he could scale walls, hmmmm.  You do see the love for his daughter though as well as for his friends in the movie.  I have to say that there were way too many people in this movie being introduced who all wanted to get their paws on the stones.  It’s hard to establish who is one whose side.  I did manage to see my buddy, Terry Tate in the movie, but he died.  He was one of the many characters that had a very limited amount of screen time but was supposed to add something to the story.  Hopefully Silver and Bartkowiak can fix their problems for the next movie.  Maybe next time too, Jet Li could have some more fight scenes where he can actually show off his talent instead of the director wasting it. 

Grade

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