Spaghetti East-meets-Western

What, exactly, was director Sngmoo Lee’s motivation for making “The Warrior’s Way”? A simple answer would be to cash in on the star power of Jang Dong-geon, a heart-throb sensation in his home country of South Korea. Or perhaps Lee — a first-time director — was channeling Sergio Leone in an effort to cram the Western genre with martial arts and spin the spaghetti western into something more palatable for our modern generation — a bulgogi western, if you will.

Whatever the reason, the film ends up a disjointed mash-up of Western and Eastern action movie cliches. “The Warrior’s Way” begins in some indeterminate, faraway land, where the shadowy Jang, having finally defeated the leaders of a rival assassin clan, is about to deliver the final deathblow to his enemies by killing their last living descendant — who turns out to be a cute little infant girl. After deciding to adopt her instead, his own clan marks him for assassination, leaving him no choice but to burn his possessions, abandon his homeland and sail away to America.

Somehow, he ends up in Lode, a tiny, one-road town somewhere in the generic American West. Jang nabs a job doing the locals’ laundry, and he spends his days hanging up sheets on clotheslines, tending his flower garden and trying to mute out the “weeping of all the souls” he has taken in his violent past.

He meets Kate Bosworth, an overly talkative cowgirl, who is training to be a knife thrower in the town circus. Jang, who knows a thing or two about sharp pointy things himself, teaches her the art of blade-wielding through a number of flirtatious tutoring sequences set in epic green-screen backdrops. All is well, it seems, until Christmas Day, when a band of brawny marauders, led by Danny Huston, show up, ready to rape and pillage.

What ensues is one incredibly long, video-game-inspired battle sequence. Heads are cut off, blood spatters, limbs get blown up and all the townsfolk join in, including Geoffrey Rush as an inebriated ex-outlaw.

Then, a huge brigade of ninja assassins flies in out of nowhere, and “The Warrior’s Way” turns into an all-out “Cowboys vs. Ninjas” warzone. But the fusion of martial arts and firearms does not produce the spectacle one would hope for. Instead, we’re treated to an ultra-stylized, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” brand of superhuman butt-kicking. Jang’s kills, however dazzling, are a little too easy.

Bosworth and Jang do strike up some semblance of a romance, and while it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s always satisfying to see Asian men as viable love interests in Hollywood films. Unfortunately, “The Warrior’s Way” has a tough time shaking off other stereotypes, most notably the laconic, unfeeling archetype of the Asian martial artist. Jang, for all his good looks and international fame, lets Bosworth do all the talking. Seriously — you could almost count the number of words Jang speaks on one hand.

It’s a shame that Jang’s American premiere exposed us to nothing but his ability to keep a stoic face on screen. The derivative “The Warrior’s Way” shows us that sometimes, when you try to combine two good things, you end up with the worst of both.