I vaguely remember The Warrior’s Way coming out last year. I don’t think I saw trailers for it on TV, but maybe on DVDs. I can’t remember, though I do remember thinking it was interesting that Kate Bosworth and Geoffrey Rush were in a martial arts action flick. That seemed like a weird enough combination to make a mental note of the movie in my brain. So, when I saw that it was available on Netflix Instant the other day, I gave it a watch.

I really wanted to like the movie, but there’s a few key things working against it. The plot is pretty cool: Yang is the best samurai in the world, tasked with killing an entire family, which he does, mostly. The only one he lets live is a tiny baby that he winds up raising himself. To get away from the assassin group he once belonged to, Yang heads to America and winds up in a wild west town populated by the members of a traveling circus trying to build their own town. They have their own set of problems in the form of a group of jerky cowboy outlaws who regularly terrorize them. All of this sounds great, by the way, because it hinted at a final battle that would include both cowboys and samurai assassins.

The problem lies in the movie’s use of green screen, which never quite looks good or real. Every single outdoor scene–which make up a good 75% of the movie–was shot on a green screen and just doesn’t look right. I get the feeling the director, Sngmoo Lee, was going for a kind of fantastical vibe, but it just looked corny and cartoony instead of stylistic. When you’re so violently taken out of the reality of the movie in these ways, it doesn’t help, it only hinders.

And, again, that’s really too bad, because overall I really liked the idea of this movie. There are even some rad fight scenes to be find when the filmmakers back away from the wire-fu stuff a little bit. There’s one fight between Bosworth and her main bad guy (played perfectly by Danny Huston) that is brutal and harsh and gnarly, making it one of the shining stars in the sky of this movie. I’m not sure if I would recommend The Warrior’s Way or not. It has a lot of goodness, but most of the actual visuals are jarring in a way that makes you almost want to turn it off.