Jenn, Jason and I saw Cradle 2 the Grave last night. I love Jet Li movies to begin with, I'm a huge fan... Fist of Legend is one of my favorite movies ever. I figured this movie was just going to be a "buddy cop" movie with a thin plot excuse for some ass kicking, but it was a LOT better than I expected. I totally recommend this movie, but my suggestion is to kind of turn off your brain during the last 20 minutes... some dumb things happen during that time. Again though... highly recommended.

A couple of things I really enjoyed about the movie:

• The main characters were all intelligent. There was a group of 4 characters that were friends and I was happy that none of them were assigned the "goofy bumbling sidekick" role, even though one of the actors as a general rule plays that character in other movies. The only goofy character is played by Tom Arnold and even his character is intelligent and competent.


• Everything is interracial. I like that when they walk into clubs, or any scene really, that I never feel like the entire room is white people or black people or whatever. It feels so much more real to me when I see a room of all types of people. That's one of the things I feel like Jet Li's movies do a lot.


• Realistic fighting! With the exception of probably one scene in the whole movie, everyone of the fightscenes felt totally real to me. Of the good guys, only Jet Li's character, Su, is the only one who knows martial arts. However, all of the other characters are good fighters. When one of the good characters, who's just a street fighter, comes up against one of the martial artist bad characters, I really felt the fight was how it would go in real life. The martial artist would get a few well executed strikes in, then it would get pulled down to the street brawl level until the martial artist could try to pull away and bring it back to her level. Very different from the master vs. master scene, but very enjoyable and believable!

Now... we cannot have the good without the bad. They attempt to make the plot more epic and probably topical than they needed it to be. In my opinion, near the end of the movie, it starts to break apart a little bit and you should prepare yourself for it. It adds 2 or 3 elements of improbability to the plot that didn't need to be there and just weakened it overall.

So... great movie, go see it, don't think near the end. :)