This month I'd like to warn you about a little disaster called "Running on Karma." It's not even really much of a martial arts movie, but it is from China and there are a couple of sparse kung-fu-ish scenes, so I decided it qualified for this column. "Running on Karma" starts in a male strip club. Several men are up on stage, doing their thing. One of them is Andy Lau in a muscle suit. A huge fake muscle suit. I thought that it was supposed to be a huge fake muscle suit. I thought "Oh, this is part of his stripper routine, at the end he takes that off, too." Except he didn't. Despite the fact that the huge muscles are so incredibly fake looking, and we can see the seam where the muscle suit ends at the base of his neck, he spends 99.9% of the movie in it. It doesn't get any better from here. Andy Lau is playing a character named Big. He used to be a monk, but then he became a bodybuilder, with some stripping on the side. He also has the ability to see past lives and karma, and this somehow tells him when/how people are doing to die. This ability gets him tangled up in a police case where they're looking for this crazy Indian guy whose yoga powers are as fake as the muscle suit. Also working on the case is a hapless young female cop - who serves as sort of a love interest for Big, which is to say she's interested in some Big love, and he's not really - and a very angry detective. The major problem with this movie is its incredibly uneven tone. At times it seems to want to be a comedy - the muscle suit itself could be some big running joke - with silly semi-slapstick gags. But there's some really brutal violence mixed in. Then the last act takes a very serious turn. The humor isn't funny, but it undermines every attempt the film makes to be dramatic. Reviewers on IMDB seem to think that this is a very deep film with symbolic Buddhist meanings. The ending seems to suggest that. But again, it's undermined by the poor attempts at comedy and the unnecessary brutality. Yes, sometimes people have to hit rock-bottom before they can be redeemed. But I don't think that movie plots should go through the same process.

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Copyright © 2009 By AJ Reardon E-mail AJ at: ErtheFae@aol.com Visit AJ at: www.erthefae.com