The Tournament: crap or not crap?
Battle Royale crossed with The Most Dangerous Game. A touch of Running Man.
Every seven years, a shady gambling organization (FullTilt?) holds a tournament whose participants are the world's 30 most deadly assassins. They fight to the death in an unwitting town. It's hard to believe the world's assassin population can replenish itself so ably in only seven years, but these kinds of plot devices are not meant to be questioned.
The action scenes range from good to silly. (There's one moment where you will say, "oh yeah, that's smart...smart assassin," and then several scenes later, "no, that's dumb...dumb assassin. Why was he smart before and dumb now?") I gravitate to Battle Royale/Most Dangerous Game type plots, and while The Tournament doesn't exactly carve out new ground, it was refreshing to see that it tied up all its loose ends and didn't make a cheap play for sequel material. The film does have the requisite gaping plot hole of this variety: "so assassin X did Y, and that seemed to work, so why didn't more of the assassins do Y? They're supposed to be the world's best."
Naturally, a normal citizen gets caught up in the action, and the resulting moralizing is a bit dim, but at least they tried.
We can safely lump the 'assassin with a heart of gold' trope in with the 'hooker with a heart of gold' trope as one that needs to be buried forever. Overall, the good outweighs the bad. Not crap.
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