Exclusive Hi-Res Poster for ‘The Tournament’

Last week we posted the trailer and some movie stills for the upcoming action film The Tournament, which is directed by Scott Mann and stars Ving Rhames, Robert Carlyle and Kelly Hu. If you haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, please jump over and check it out; you will not be disappointed.

Today we bring you an exclusive hi-res poster for The Tournament, a better look at previous those pictures, plus a brand new one. All brought to you courtesy of Mann Made Films. Let’s hope this film picks up an U.S. distributor; I’d hate to have to fly to England just to watch a movie. Click each picture for a larger hi-res version then read below for some discussion.

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ACTION in The Tournament

ANTON BOGART (Sebastien Foucan) pushed by car

FATHER MACAVOY (Robert Carlyle)

MILES SLADE (Ian Somerhalder) torments JOSHUA HARLOW (Ving Rhames) in The Tournament

I continue to really like what Mann and company are trying to do here. Usually independent films make drama, romance and even comedies very well because those genres don’t usually require large budgets or set pieces – except for Funny People, which apparently couldn’t be made for less than $75 million – so those style films typically turn out to be very good. Independent action films, however, tend not to be done very well because they require much larger budgets and most independent studios do not have the type of funding to pull it off properly. More often than not, the story is usually intriguing but you just can’t get passed the under-budgeted action scenes to truly enjoy the film.

That doesn’t seem to be the case with The Tournament. It looks like they were able to secure enough funding to make the action scenes worth watching and blend well with the story. Plus, they brought in some very decent actors.

Some of you have commented how it looks like Battle Royal or another “multiple killers trying to be the best of the best” type movie, and this may be true, but the problem is you don’t really remember anything from those movies because, frankly, they weren’t worth remembering. Only time will tell, though, if The Tournament turns out to be as cool and fun as the trailer makes it out to be.

I have several favorite scenes from movies that I could watch over and over: The Matrix Reloaded scene when the human army battles the robot “squids”; the Equilibrium “gun-kata” scene at the end; and now The Tournament scene with the car pushing the guy on his back while he fires. Damn I hope that whole part of the movie is as cool as it looks here!

The Tournament shoots up the screen in the UK later this year, but dang-flippin-nabbit there is no release date for the U.S. because they are all too busy trying to shove worthless crap like Battleship, Monopoly and Asteroids down our throats!