Held every seven years in some unsuspecting town, The Tournament is a numbers game. For 24 hours, 30 of the world’s best assassins compete for a $10 million prize in a competition with only one rule: Kill or die. What more setup does an action-craving viewer need?
With tracking devices implanted in their tummies, contestants worthy of note include a parkouring Frenchman (Sebastien Foucan, who performed similar duties against 007 in 2006’s Casino Royale), a crazy-ass Texan (a miscast Ian Somerhalder, TV’s Lost), a Russian special forces member (Undisputed series badass Scott Adkins), a Triad vet (Kelly Hu, X-Men 2’s Lady Deathstrike) and the returning champion (Ving Rhames, Pulp Fiction). The latter is only in it to avenge the recent death of his wife by the trigger-happy hands of a fellow contestant — he just doesn’t know which one. Blah, details.
This particular do-or-die tourney takes place in Middlesbrough, a British town boasting more public surveillance cameras than anywhere on the globe — fortuitous for the assembled high-rollers hoping to make a mint off the blood of 29 hired guns. They are as unapologetic about their gambling as director Scott Mann (2015’s Heist) is about depicting irredeemably graphic acts of violence; let’s just say more than one human head explodes.
Accidentally caught in the crossfire of the shoot-’em-up (by events so unbelievable, explanation is futile) is a hooch-sloshing priest (Robert Carlyle, Trainspotting) and, one assumes, the audience surrogate. Yet you need not be inebriated to feel The Tournament’s juice kick in; Mann and company take care of providing the rush on their own. Virtually unseen, the film deserves better — not pantheon placement, but some sort of regard among fans of swiftly and slickly executed set pieces of undiluted action. Mann does that so well and so often, it seems as if the flick weren’t scripted so much as improvised, taking suggestions from audience members into what situations he should throw his players and their weapons: “In a slaughterhouse!” “At a strip club!” “On a moving bus! You know, the double-decker kind!” —Rod Lott