7 Guardians of the Tomb

It did take a while for me to watch 'Guardians of the Tomb' and was really not sure whether to do so. The trailer and advertising looking absolutely terrible, enough to make one giving the film a wide berth, but 'Guardians of the Tomb' happened to be the film choice for the family/friend film night (being a massive film fan of all genres old and new missing it was out of the question) and was watched with low expectations felt by all prior. 'Guardians of the Tomb' did turn out to be as bad as the advertising made it look and as has been said about it. It has often been cited as one of the worst films of 2018 and it's on my personal worst films list. It completely fails to be cheesy fun or a mild diversion, as was clearly intended. Watched 'Guardians of the Tomb' bearing that in mind and judging it from that standpoint, being someone who judges a film for what it is trying to do and be and the film is a failure when it fails to achieve its goal, something that in my mind 'Guardians of the Tomb' does. Only two decent things here. One is the scenery, which is pleasing on the eyes and has atmosphere. The other, and the best thing about the film, is Kelsey Grammer (have always loved him in 'Cheers', his voice work and especially 'Frasier', though he does done quite a lot of bad films in recent years) giving his absolute all and having a blast. Not subtle at all by all means, but he is the one aspect where the film showed signs of trying. Rest of the acting is awful. As chronically dull as Kellen Lutz is, it is the insufferably annoying Bingbing Li who wins the dubious award of worst performances. The cast are saddled with characters that are never interesting or endearing, which makes it difficult forgive that they are every archetype in the genre 'Guardians of the Tomb' falls into, and a script that goes well overboard on the cheese factor. Furthermore, that the story in 'Guardians of the Tomb' has not one original thought, and instead a mix of done to death genre tropes, is the least of that component's problems. More problematic are that there are no thrills, fun or suspense to be had. It is too excessively predictable and perfunctory in pace to be thrilling, far too intelligence-insultingly dumb and muddled with too many ideas handled vaguely to be fun and with never a sense of anything at stake or menacing threat to be suspenseful. It doesn't even look good, with a direct to video-like look similar to films made for the SyFy channel, with special effects that would look out of date 20+ years ago. Concluding, very poor. 2/10 Bethany Cox