‘Warrior’s Gate’ Scores More Hit Points With New Trailer

2017 has already gifted us with a number of delightfully odd films, both in terms of genre mash-ups and international collaboration. From the throwback glory of Monster Trucks to the gleeful global carnage of xXx: Return of Xander Cage to the monster adventure dopiness of The Great Wall, it’s been a pretty good year for entertaining genre projects so far. From the looks of things, The Warrior’s Gate might follow suit. Have you ever wanted to see a movie where a scrawny geeky kid is dropped into the video game world that he prefers to his own reality? Look no further…

Aside from the fact that it has a white savior thing going on, this looks like a lot of fun. In fact, it’s exactly the kind of film that I would have gone nuts over as a kid 25-30 years ago. It’s basically a Chinese sword and sorcery version of The Last Starfighter, with a dash of Last Action Hero, which falls right within my wheelhouse. The budget was apparently around $50 million and it looks pretty great. The giant orc seems a bit wonky, but given the video game narrative, that’s utterly fine. All that really matters is how fun it is as a whole. Besides, I’m all about big crazy films that aren’t just sequels/prequels/reboots of the usual franchises. Variety is the spice of life, especially when it comes to cinema.

This project was a co-production between France and China, which explains the presence of Uriah Shelton (“The Glades“, “Girl Meets World“) in the lead and the ever-imposing Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) as the villain, amidst a predominantly Asian cast. It comes to us from of the director of the surprisingly-good Cockneys vs. Zombies and the inseparable writing team of Luc Besson (The Fifth Element, Valerian) and Robert Mark Kamen (The Karate Kid, The Transporter). It looks like it received a theatrical release in China back in November, but a U.S. release date has not yet been announced. EuropaCorp appears to be handling its release here. Hopefully some more information about its arrival will come our way soon, now that it has a new trailer.

The Warrior’s Gate is the latest film from veteran genre writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. It is directed by Mattias Hoene and produced by Luc Besson and Mark Gao, as a co-production between EuropaCorp and Fundamental Films. The picture stars Uriah Shelton as ‘Jack Bronson’, Mark Chao as ‘Zhao’, Ni Ni as ‘Princess Su Lin’, Francis Ng as ‘The Wizard’, Dave Bautista as ‘Arun the Cruel’, Sienna Guillory as ‘Annie Bronson’, Zha Ka as ‘Brutus’, Dakota Daulby as ‘Travis Leigh’, Luke Mac Davis as ‘Hector’, and Ron Smoorenburg as ‘The Black Knight’.