Robert Fitzgerald, or RZA as he’s known to fans in the rap community, possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of martial arts films, specifically those within the Chinese wuxia and Japanese jidaigeki genre that was popular in the late 70’s. And anyone that’s listened to his music will be well aware of this. Both the his group’s Wu-Tang moniker and the title of their enormously successful debut album 36 Chambers, which relies heavily on sampling and, are derived from films RZA watched as a young man with and his late cousin Ole Dirty Bastard.  He is a self-purported cinephile, who dreamed up the project almost ten years ago with Eli Roth–horror film director turned actor/producer/body who is supervising his feature film The Man With The Iron Fists which opens today.

These two auteurs share a distinct backgrounds in music, film and history, and it shows in the shared understanding of the mythology of their characters. The research too, speaks for this attention to detail (RZA is reported to have picked out props down to test-tubes that were appropriate to the time period). Roth, who also co-wrote the screenplay, stepped in to assist with the visual direction, noticeable with the witty dialogue and high-body count the film racks up for his fans. Notwithstanding, the film is presented by Quentin Tarantino, who dutifully showed up to set everyday. Maybe this is a rare thing for an Executive Producer, but then again maybe not to an auteur like Tarantino who has effectively loaned many of his existing friends, players and crew for this production–Costume Designer Thomas Chong, Editor Joe D’Augustine, Actress Lucy Liu and a slough of producers between them.

And just to really drive home how much of a passion project this became, one might also share the decades of martial arts training shared between Cung Li, Byron Mann, Rick Yune and David Bautista–at the Olympic level in some cases with WWE, and oh yeah, did I’d be wrong not to mention Gordon Liu who made his first splash in Kung Fu films nearly four decades ago… RZA who is himself a trained martial artist consulted Choreographer Corey Yuen and created some fighting styles that are as meticulously crafted as they are unequivocally bad-ass. And then there’s Pam Grier in a brilliant cameo. Oh right, Russell Crowe also in one instance, bloated–he put on a significant amount of weight for the role–and drunk removes anal beads from a prostitute with his teeth and announces “let me put the baby inside yah.” Eli Roth himself has called it a “supergroup.”

So, The Man With The Iron Fists is, is an audacious project with a hell of a lot of integrity and potential. It’s a bunch of buddies getting together to geek out. But there’s something amiss in the execution. If I you didn’t know anything that I’ve just mentioned, you might find, as I did,

the plot labyrinthine, but the ending to be a long time coming. The characters, which are surely unique to clan, history, etc. are rarely given enough screen time and vie for attention. Count among these two central antagonists Silver Lion and three protagonists Blacksmith and Jack Knife. I can only speculate that this lack of executive decision comes from having “too many cooks in the kitchen.”

In a recent interview, Byron Mann–whose character is at once terrifying and quirky–admitted that there were so “few rehearsals” and “a level of exhaustion” on set. Eli Roth countered this in the same interview for the Cinema Source saying that they anticipated “fight fatigue” for the viewer–overexposure to too many action sequences–by developing each of the character’s fighting techniques and distinguishing them with different weapons. The problem is that these characters haven’t been allowed to develop on their own, so their movements do little to distinguish them to the untrained eye. What we see instead is something belabored. Something so burdened by research, but poorly communicated to the viewer. We can again, only speculate, that this breakdown was also an issue on set. Which Rick Yune agree was “pretty open” often with days going on for 16 to 17 hours 6 days a week.

The rough cut was over four hours, which seems to have been reduced by cutting down to the most essential, exceptional bits about each character and at the cost of pacing which would allow the viewer to see the craft that each of these parties are capable of. Instead what you have is something that tries to insist over and over again, scene after scene that this one is more exceptional than the last. So ultimately, the ending comes as kind of a relief from all these good, but failed intentions. It’s my prediction that when Django Unchained comes out at the end of this year, The Man With The Iron Fists will be all but forgotten. After all the relationship between Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz, from what we can tell from trailers, closely mimics that between the Blacksmith and Jack Knife. The difference might be that in this film, their common enemy is not one, not two, but three antagonists so the experience is tremendously scattered.