some major suspension of disbelief needed at the end
Look, I'm not interested in the raging debate here between the haters and the lovers. Never has a film seemed to have split people down the middle so much.
I'm gonna sit on the fence however. I enjoyed the earlier half of the film, and Ejiofor is always the best thing in anything he's in. For me, the film lost the plot at the end, and in particular the score near the end was horrible, so kitch.
BUUUUUT what I really wanted to say was that the fact that the fight at the end even occured was, unfortunately for the film, laughable. At a major event such as this there's a heck of a lot of security. The only job these people have is to make sure everything runs smoothly, and no fights break out outside of the ring.
And holy handbaskets, no-one can refute that if some nobody (or anybody for that matter) started a fight with the star of the show, he's gonna have about 10 guys leap on top of him and drag him away immmmmediately. The dudes ending the night in a jail cell, not as a hero honoured by the Japanese.
The bit that summed it all up was when Randy Couture looks over and points the fight out, and then everyone starts watching, like they knew that this battle had a particular special significance. Well unless they're psychic, Randy and anyone else working at the event (who wasn't in on the fix) wouldn't have a clue as to why it was going on and would be shouting for security to intervene. And at that point...we see security holding back civilians so that the fight can continue! I couldn't help but laugh, and cry- "How is this happening?!" at the screen.
I really hope I don't have someone respond to this with "It's just a movie, dude." Because the whole "It doesn't have to be realistic" argument frustrates me when the film is based in reality. Real people should act how real people act, and they definitely shouldn't act based on information that they don't have.