It’s Billy Zane week! He sings on “Boston Public” Monday night; at 7 p.m. Sunday night TBS airs “Invincible,” starring a far balder Zane.
TV Guide says:
Cutting-edge effects and high-flying martial-arts action punch up this stylish 2001 cable thriller from co-executive producers Mel Gibson and Jet Li. Billy Zane stars as a mystical warrior named Os, a former evildoer who renounces his wicked past by waging war against the supremely sinister Slate (David Field) and the Shadowmen, who are plotting to destroy Earth by using the powers of an ancient tablet. The quick-fisted wizardry of Os is on display when he rounds up four modern-day fighters---representing the elements fire, water, air and metal---and molds them into a cohesive superhuman unit to foil Slate. Michael Fu: Byron Mann. Serena: Stacy Oversier.
The Hollywood Reporter says:
This is what it must be like to watch the Fantastic Four after dropping acid. "Invincible" isn't so much a movie as it is a vacation from one's senses, a surrealistic blur of computer-generated mayhem, illusion and warrior platitudes that feels like something the late Ken Kesey might have had a hand in. It's the martial arts movie as visually arresting dream sequence: East meets "The Matrix." … Once you add "Titanic's" Billy Zane to the mix as a kind of Timothy Leary-style philosopher and fairly immobile martial artist, you've got one very weird film-viewing experience. It's almost as if scribes Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Jefery Levi were trying to see how far they could push this whacked-out mysticism thing before we'd all just kind of go, "OK, you've screwed with my mind long enough. Now please -- for the love of God -- let somebody make sense before it's too late!" Levi (who also directs) is clearly most interested in creating an artistic mood piece than a cohesive story. He relies on director of photography John Stokes, action sequence master Mark Wareham and SFX supervisor Dave Roberts to evoke an ethereal tapestry of action and interplay. It's a feast for the eyes, all right, as original artistically as it is intellectually insipid.
Variety says:
TBS martial arts actioner "Invincible" starts strongly, promises much and delivers little. It's a movie that markets itself as a kung-fu pic, but is so determined to be spiritually meaningful, and is so puerile in its sensibility, that lead Billy Zane is more self-help guru Tony Robbins than Bruce Lee. If the ensemble would just shut up and fight, pic would be bearable, but even when they do battle at the end it's pretty underwhelming. … The biggest problem by far, though, is that the editing has to compensate for the weak action scenes. Hong Kong fight choreographer Tony Siu-Tung Ching has done great work in the past (his credits include John Woo's "The Killer"), but he either doesn't have enough to work with or wasn't given enough time. There's about a minute of fun fighting in "Invincible," another minute of relatively bland wirework and the rest is tripe.
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Beware the Triffids.
Beware the Triffids.
