The Tournament - If you go down to Middlesbrough today...

...then you're sure to be in for a surprise. I confess... I have never been to Middlesbrough, but, based on what I've seen in `The Tournament' I can obviously expect to see a pretty deserted city where the few remaining inhabitants appear to adopt a `live and let live' policy to car chases on the motorway, shoot outs in strip clubs, exploding petrol stations, policemen being shot in the street, burning men running through the streets and bus hijackings.

For all these events are apparently all part of everyday life in Middlesbrough - especially when the thirty greatest assassins in the world have come together to play a `last man standing' game of death in the city, all for the benefit of some of the most clichéd billionaires ever seen.

You may have to suspend quite a lot of disbelief to truly get anything out of this film, like the way the billionaires can see every inch of Middlesbrough courtesy of CCTV cameras which can apparently peek inside buildings as well as watch streets. It's hardly a masterpiece, with many of the characters sporting fake American accents and Liam Cunningham speaking some of the most badly-written lines ever committed to film script.

There is so much wrong with this movie it's hard to list all its faults. However, there's still enough action in it to titillate most action-junkies.  The premise is just too 'out there' to be believable, i.e. that a tournament such as this can take place in any major Western city in broad daylight and yet no one really notices (plus how a man can have full body burns in one seen and then look 'a bit reddish' in the next!).  But, if you can get past that then there's plenty of reasonable action scenes to pass the time.  It's pretty forgettable, but not entirely awful. Robert Carlyle lends it a certain credibility, but Ving Rhames just looks a bit too old and fat to be believable.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that