I can understand why this movie would grate on some audience members and reviewers. You have to work hard at some points to suspend your sense of disbelief, sometimes the art direction and story choices need polish, and the dubbed voice acting definitely brings things down a bit.
What I saw here could easily (with a little of the aforementioned polish) have been on a CW television series - say, "Birds Of Prey", or "Arrow". Every featured actor or actress on screen is young, pretty (including the men), quirky, and snarky. The young heroine is well trained and athletic (although she could have used another 20 lbs of muscle to believably survive some of the punches her character takes). And she can act.
Most of the fight choreography would not have been out of place in a typical Jackie Chan film - clever, frenetic, mildly humorous, featuring lots of backflips and slipped punches - although Valentine doesn't do Chan's characteristic bug-eyed dismay and exasperation. Maybe the producers thought it wouldn't look good on a young woman.
Is it gritty and realistic ? Well, no, but do you really want to see a pretty young girl spitting teeth? I don't.
So really, this is OK-to-good. It just lacks any real sense of gravitas. It's TV level story making released as a movie. OK time waster if you like CW style heroics.
What I saw here could easily (with a little of the aforementioned polish) have been on a CW television series - say, "Birds Of Prey", or "Arrow". Every featured actor or actress on screen is young, pretty (including the men), quirky, and snarky. The young heroine is well trained and athletic (although she could have used another 20 lbs of muscle to believably survive some of the punches her character takes). And she can act.
Most of the fight choreography would not have been out of place in a typical Jackie Chan film - clever, frenetic, mildly humorous, featuring lots of backflips and slipped punches - although Valentine doesn't do Chan's characteristic bug-eyed dismay and exasperation. Maybe the producers thought it wouldn't look good on a young woman.
Is it gritty and realistic ? Well, no, but do you really want to see a pretty young girl spitting teeth? I don't.
So really, this is OK-to-good. It just lacks any real sense of gravitas. It's TV level story making released as a movie. OK time waster if you like CW style heroics.