I must begin with an admission, which will explain my warning. I only checked this out because an acquaintance of mine is in this, uh, movie. You must take my warning seriously - there is no other reason to see this. None whatsoever. Ignore this warning at your peril. I get the impression of a small group of people getting together on this project, maybe they all go to the same martial arts school. All fine and good; they get a video camera and then proceed to make the worst possible concoction of video images. There's an early chase scene, but both the pursued and pursuer content themselves with jogging it out; the pursuer even starts to walk at one point; then they're jogging again. In the so-called fight scenes it looks like the participants didn't realize the camera was on and were just practicing; then they ran out of video and had to go on to another scene. The choreography - I think someone's credited for it; I hope he or she wasn't paid. It's one of those cases, a guy is hit in the stomach and grabs his knee in pain. The dialog - kind of a nineties Ed Wood feel to it. But Ed Wood was kind of funny. Not this, no, not this. Heed my warning, my friends, for we will all live in the future of this.
It's no surprise I was never clear on the plot or the point. The main character owes money to local thugs and is a druggie. So he spends a lot of time jogging away from them. I believe it's the L.A. area. It also looks like some portions of scenes are missing; either they ran out of video or didn't care to complete the job. But the, uh, movie is too long as it is. You know that old saying about 90 minutes of your life you'll never get back? I always thought that attitude was taking things too seriously - it's only bad movies - so what, right? This, uh, movie changed my mind. This can be very serious. If you watch this, it may sour you on movies for a few weeks, sort of like throwing up after drinking too much vodka one night. I almost forgot: no mention of Istanbul in the actual, uh, movie. No death run either; just some jogging.
