Parents' Guide to Jiu Jitsu

With its preposterous story, bizarre action sequences, and performances in wildly varying pitches, this action movie is, at best, a candidate for so-bad-it's-good status. To start, the alien villain in Jiu Jitsu just doesn't make any sense. If he's beaten every six years, why does he keep coming back? Not to mention that the alien himself is just a guy in a suit with a mask-screen that plays different images. He's not particularly scary or even interesting. Then, the amnesia idea makes not the slightest bit of difference in the story. There's no reason for Jake to have lost his memory other than perhaps to stretch a five-minute idea into a longer movie.

Director Dimitri Logothetis, who seems intent on making Jiu Jitsu into a new franchise, films the action sequences with a nauseating skip-frame technique that makes everything seem twitchy, like a strobe effect. And the action switches randomly back and forth from slo-mo to regular time, which somehow makes things even less exciting. Even worse, the cameras are sometimes mounted on the actors, making for an even more disorienting sensation. The performances range from emotionless and muted to barking and shouting, but none can match Cage, who these days seems to be cast in movies just so he can provide another of his trademark "unhinged" characters. At least he seems to be having fun. He may be the only one.