Two escaped convicts and a group of yakuza with a female prisoner meet in the woods. Bickering results in the death of the leader of the yakuza, but unknown to them, this is the Forest of Resurrection, and the dead man rises as a zombie. Soon, zombies are everywhere and everyone is fighting to survive as the yakuza wait for their mysterious boss, who set up the meeting and has plans for one of the prisoners.
So, what do you get if a seriously drunken John Woo takes on the job of remaking Night of the Living Dead, with a cast that includes The Three Stooges, but halfway through, the studio tells him to change it to a remake of Highlander? You get Versus, a frenetic, campy, gore fest of gangsters, samurais, zombies, magicians, and government agents. Sounds complicated? Well, it’s not. Here’s the plot: guys try to kill others guys and zombies while girl complains about killings. That’s it. There are a few moments given over to exposition, stating that in the woods there’s a gate to some other world and one of the guys wants someone else’s blood to open the gate, but the gate and its destination aren’t defined.
So, we start off with an hour of Hong Kong style gun play, where people jump and shoot, shoot two handed, shoot in slow motion, and have Mexican standoffs before shooting. It’s pretty cool for ten minutes. It’s not bad for twenty. But eventually, I was looking at the clock wondering if anything besides shooting was going to happen. It’s a good thing I wasn’t waiting for character development. There are three personality traits in the movie: serious while killing, silly while killing, object to killing—and only the girl has the third. I’ve been calling them “guys” and “the girl” because they aren’t even given names.
At the halfway mark, the killing slows since all the regular zombies are gone. Now it’s the “cool” guy with a coat who’s traveling with the girl, versus the boss yakuza and his undead aids who don’t move like zombies. Of course, they still shoot at each other, but they also use swords. Since there are fewer bodies to be blown away, there’s more time for slow motion attacks and posing (though there was plenty of posing in the first half). Plus, now we get to sit and watch the two opponents stare as the camera travels around and around and around them.
Humor is a problem all the way through. There are many attempts, most of which are nothing more than extreme overacting (a guy screaming as he throws his arms around over his head). It never reaches the sophistication of The Three Stooges, nor is it as funny (so if you dislike The Stooges, this is going to be unpleasant).
While none of the characters manage “cool,” they try for it constantly, flipping long leather coats, putting on sunglasses dramatically, and otherwise looking like they’ve studied male modeling at an incompetent mail order school. But even if they could pull off the look, it wouldn’t have worked. To paraphrase a short evil dude, “when everyone is cool, no one is.”
Versus isn’t a bad time, but it isn’t really a movie either. It’s more like the dailies from the violent shooting days for a movie. Now they have to shoot the rest of the film and edit it together.