The Man With The Iron Fists

Over 20 years of kung-fu fetishism finally gets its payoff with this, the directorial debut of Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, a film that finds him living out all his Shaolin fantasies as the titular wielder of two welded fists. Not that you'll see much of RZA himself in this trailer: Here he ranks a distant third—or even fourth or fifth—behind Lucy Liu's fan-and-seduction-flaunting and Russell Crowe's cowboy brandishing big knives, not to mention all the other specially skilled 19th-century warriors taking out each other's eyeballs, and unsheathing spring-loaded spikes out of just about everything. RZA's somewhat crowded out behind the camera too by Eli Roth, who takes the top screenwriting credit, and the introductory "Quentin Tarantino Presents," both of which set up the film's slow-mo, heavily stylized violence and winking grindhouse aesthetic ("They put the F-U in Kung Fu") that are their own forte. But then, the RZA's always done his best work in the background.