Black Lotus

The movie doesn't make any sense in it's totality. Let me explain. The movie starts with a number of events that are totally not coherent to each other. I was thinking: what is this scene trying to say? Will it later come to a plottwist or something? I've got the feeling they had a script for 30 minutes and needed to fill another hour with pointless scenes.

Now the main actor, Rico Verhoeven. I think the guy should keep it to boxing. I heard he partly financed the movie with his own money. Well, determination I guess. But the guy isn't made for acting. Rico has a terrible accent that he even more tries to hide. I mean, if you're not a fluent English speaker, don't give him this roll. Speaking of accents, everybody in the movie had a weird accent. Also, a typical Dutch family that speaks English? That needed some explanation.

Back to Rico. He had the main roll because of the financing, I guess. The funny thing is that the director probably knew he wasn't a born actor, and kept his mouth shut all movie. I think I've never seen a main actor talk so less in a movie. Also, I'm wondering if Rico was able to pick some scenes for himself. Because around 3 times he was doing some stuff without a shirt on, while some sexy music was playing. Pretty hilarious in a way.

The movie sucks in every way possible. Maybe, if you want a laugh about a movie that's just really bad, you should go to the cinema and watch this movie. Otherwise, keep the money in your pockets!

It's difficult to find the words to describe just how bad this movie is. The acting of everyone is abismal but I guess it's hard to act when the script is done by a beta version of ChatGPT that was trained on the worst B-movies of the 80s. There's even a shameless ripoff scene of the classic movie Amsterdamned (watch that one instead!) where a corpse is dragged over a sightseeing canalboat.

The cinematography is crap and it looks like they could afford 1 drone but were not allowed to fly it so they took quick illegals shots on 4 locations that you keep seeing.

And the action.... WHERE IS THE ACTION?!

There's I think 5 minutes worth of scenes that could be called 'action scenes'.

On the surface Black Lotus seems like the type of movie Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude van Damme would've starred in when they were in their prime. Unfortunately even by those standards this movie falls short. I knew this would be rough to sit through when we get an opening sequence that seems like it's trying to rip off Christopher Nolan's Tenet although it's no where near as good. You know those foreign action movies on Netflix that look really bad from every perspective except for the action and some flashy visuals? Black Lotus is essentially the same quality as one of those Netflix foreign action movies. Maybe slightly worse.

The acting from everyone including Rico isn't good. (Although it was hard to tell if some actors were dubbed or not.) Frank Grillo is the only one here who actually felt like a professional. Speaking of Frank Grillo by this point I think he's above doing movies like this so I can only assume he had bills to pay or something. So bad writing, bad acting for the most part. Well at least Rico Verhoeven can sell you on being a badass action star right? Wrong. With better writing and a better director maybe. Also I thought Rona Lee Shimon who's the female lead here and best known for Netflix's Fauda came off more badass here than Rico did.

I understand Rico Verhoeven has a dream to make it as an actor! But is there no one who can tell him he simply has no screen presence nor charisma on the big screen. Even if the the script, dialogue, direction and other elements were on point this still would've been a bust! Frank Grillo is a solid actor with some good work under his belt. Rico has the same but not in acting! It is remarkable that no one slammed the breaks on this train wreck. Rico seems to be a stand up guy with qualities but this is not it. Action stars are seldomly great actors but they often have a presence that compensates! I would think twice at taking another run at this. I would rather not do it than do it (this) badly! There have been very few actors of Dutch origin who were able to carve out a decent career in the US / english language movies and they could actually act. I doubt this will be even remotely successful in the Netherlands let alone internationally!

Luckily the movie looks really cheap so they might make a euro when all is said and done. A sequel seems completely out of the question and who would want one? I do hope Rico wins his next match in the ring though, that's were he stands out!

There's some nice scenery and decent cinematography, and an adequate score for a B film, but the rest is all underwhelming. Maybe casting a stronger lead may have made this film more watchable, because Rico Verhoeven can't act. I'm sure part blame goes to poor cast directing, but it seems the rest of the cast held their own, so I can't say for sure. Verhoeven was just too bland, expressionless and carried himself like a big doofus. He was ok I guess in the action scenes, although hard to tell from the poor fight choreography. The female Interpol agent had a better fight scene at the end and looked more like an action star than Verhoeven. The only person who carried most of the film was Grillo, who wasn't on screen much, and he deserves much better than this mess. The writing was just a bunch of variations and cliches from much better movies in this genre. Even at a mere 90 min runtime, the pacing was slow and the story lacked urgency and was underwhelming, and just dragged onto the next predictable scene after scene.