Okay, settle down and listen up, because this premise is a doozy. In the near future, religious extremism leads to so many terrorist attacks that all the world’s faiths finally agree to stop killing each other. Instead, they’ll each train one martial artist and hold a big fighting tournament. The faith that wins will take over the world, and all the others will be outlawed.
That’s Lexi Alexander’s “Absolute Dominion,” and if it sounds more like a Patton Oswalt routine than a real movie, Alexander seems to agree. The movie literally begins with Patton Oswalt, playing a very Patton Oswalt-ish influencer, suggesting the religious rumble off the top of his head. He seems just as surprised as anybody that it went viral, let alone got taken seriously. It says a lot about contemporary culture that whereas once our minds boggled trying to imagine how the dystopian futures of “Logan’s Run” and “The Purge” were successfully pitched and implemented, now you just have to tell us someone suggested something ridiculous on TikTok and we all just kinda went for it. Because, yeah, that basically tracks.
“Absolute Dominion” stars Désiré Mia as Sagan Bruno, a martial artist fighting on behalf of atheism. This makes him a target for every other competitor, since to most people the only thing worse than your religion losing is the whole concept of religion losing altogether. It quickly becomes clear that Sagan is a serious contender, so a corrupt official (Julie Ann Emery) starts bending the rules to make him fight tougher and tougher opponents. Eventually she just throws up her hands and calls in the assassins. I guess people who think religion is necessary to make people act morally are sometimes massive hypocrites.
Lexi Alexander’s film sounds like unambiguous pro-atheist propaganda, and perhaps it could be forgiven if it went down that road. Instead she complicates the themes of “Absolute Dominion” by making Sagan himself a messianic figure, suggesting that while atheism may be the best-case scenario for world government — you know, that whole “separation of church and state” thing that not everybody agrees on anymore — the practice of atheism in government doesn’t preclude or even necessarily challenge the existence of god. Perhaps god would want us to stop fighting over how we believe in god, has anyone ever thought of that before? It seems like a reasonable idea.
“Absolute Dominion” asks big questions and answers a few of them, but it’s not just a sci-fi movie. It’s also a fight movie. This is where you’d probably expect a Lexi Alexander film to shine, since she earned her status as a cult icon directing the outlandishly violent “Punisher: War Zone.” The fights in “Absolute Dominion” are effectively choreographed and sometimes unexpected, but they’re surprisingly muted in their presentation.
This bizarre concept naturally lends itself to a bizarre execution. Surely, for instance, the Snake Handlers would employ Snake Style, straight out of Yuen Woo-ping’s classic “Snake in Eagle’s Shadow.” Alexander chooses to ignore any such temptation towards whimsy, leaving her film feeling less like Paul Bartel’s “Death Race 2000” and more like Stuart Gordon’s “Robot Jox,” but without the stop-motion robots. (Note: All movies are improved with stop-motion robots.)
Alexander also sets the film entirely in an early wild card phase of the tournament, not the final tournament itself, which may leave room for sequels or might simply be budget-consciousness in action. The biggest downfall of “Absolute Dominion” is that the premise means that this fighting tournament, even in its early stages, should be the most important event taking place in the world. But the actual fights take place in a sterile, vaguely-futuristic gymnasium, with hardly anyone in the audience.
Did capitalism already lose this early in the game? (Be honest, we treat it like a religion.) It seems like tickets would be in high demand and cost a fortune. They even have a theatrical “Hunger Games”-esque master of ceremonies played by Alok Vaid-Menon, but as far selling the tournament goes they have every reason to go to “11” and yet for some reason their performance gets stuck at a “6.” For many reasons this movie never feels as big as we’re repeatedly told it is.
It’s disappointing that Lexi Alexander’s film doesn’t have the budget to back up its premise, but when you think of the film less like a potential blockbuster and more like an atypically intelligent straight-to-video genre film, it’s easy to admire it. It’s got an absurd premise, but that premise opens the door for characters with powerful motivations and impossibly high stakes. It’s that rare action movie that succeeds because it’s challenging and intriguing, which is a nice way of saying that maybe it could have kicked slightly more ass.
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