Netflix WU ASSASSINS, Almost Good

The advertising had caught my eye and I decided to check it out, but I ended up powering through one of Netflix's latest offerings, Wu Assassins, starring Iko Uwais, Katheryn Winnick, Byron Mann, Lewis Tan, Tommy Flanagan and a few more., with mid to late season appearances by such popular talent as Summer Glau, & Kevin Durand.

The evil elementals are coming to town and one man, unbeknownst to him, is selected to be the one true warrior to bring them all down, called the Wu Assassins.

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The series starts out introducing us to the primary characters, but the introductions feel forced and rushed, followed by some trying story moments and effects.

But I chose to commit to seeing the 10-episode season through to the end, albeit, a lot of 10-second jump button hits!

Once the introductions and settings settle down, the story actually started to improve and take better shape about mid-season to the point of interesting me.

But...

This is a 10-episode series and to be honest, there was an awful lot of filler with fights and long, drawn out character chatter and more fights and... and...  dang, when the fights break out, they take a long time. And what's up with the thugs holding their own with our main hero, who is supposed to take on a super-powered characters? And to be honest, I can't tell how many times a bad guy should get his arm crunched or cracked or gristle-wrenched before they go down. Seriously! If my arm made any of the noises theirs did when the good guy crunched them, I'd be on the ground crying for medic the first time. But these guys kept getting up!

So as the story heated up to its finale, something weird happened in the last third of the last episode...

The BIG fight I was expecting wasn't much of a tussle at all, and then we spend nearly the back third of the episode, after the resolution, settling out character stories yet again.

To some degree, with all the stories being closed out, it got me on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Was the story really resolved? Was the bad guy not really the bad guy? Or was it all a dream?

Eh, but alas, we were just being treated to how everyone fared after the events of the actual culmination of good over evil triumph.  I think.

The series ended on a small nudge of a cliff hanger, but I'm not sure if we'll see a second season. If we do, I'd be surprised.

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What confuses me is that this series nabbed an 81% from Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.5 out of 10 from IMDb users. Which is weird because usually the RT critics are the more harsh opinions and the IMDb gang, the more liberal.

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