If The Warrior’s Way teaches us anything (and it does), it’s that sentimentality is surprisingly durable. The movie’s ruthless ninja protagonist (Dong-gun Jang) finds and decides to foster a baby (Analin Rudd) in the first few minutes of the film, and the resultant fuzzy-cuddly vibes linger pleasantly for at least an hour. Rudd gives the best performance in the movie by a long shot, and I don’t mean that as a slight to the rest of the cast, which includes Geoffrey Rush in okay form and Danny Huston in excellent. It’s actually rather wonderful that the movie allows a baby’s cuteness to upstage the plot (which is nonsense) and the characters (who are cartoons). The wide-eyed, squealing baby is emblematic of the first section of the film, in which the ninja, upon having his heart warmed by said infant, travels from the Mystical East to the Wild West and settles down in a frontier town. And starts a respectable laundry business. And plants a multicolored flower garden. And develops a fluttery adolescent crush on Kate Bosworth. Such a maudlin interlude should be instant death for a ridiculous action movie like this. The fact that it’s charming points to the silly beauty of the movie. It goes without saying that writer-director Sngmoo Lee is no John Ford, yet this early section pulls off quite well a hyperactive-pastiche variation on Ford’s nostalgic My Darling Clementine. It’s unfortunate (although not surprising) that this charm is ultimately tossed aside for the sake of “cool” violent posturing.

For its laconic hero and the gooey stylization of its action sequences, Warrior’s Way has been compared with the “spaghetti Westerns” of Sergio Leone by many critics.  It’s a comparison that makes sense superficially, but Lee exaggerates his pulpy archetypes and poker-faced showdowns into an absurd mélange—quite the opposite of Leone’s mythic solemnity. Like Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name,” Jang proves inexplicably invincible in battle. However, his invincibility is not justified by an Eastwood-like aura of supernatural authority; it’s just an arbitrary rule. Portentously phosphorescent skies, images juxtaposing Absolute Good And Evil, sweat-and-grit close-ups, and reverently formal fight choreography are all employed, but they are framed by a self-deprecating shrug. Leone’s style was looking for icons; Lee’s is basically looking for attractions. This isn’t a bad thing; if everything were iconic, nothing would be. What makes Lee’s style engaging is its gratuitous playfulness. The frontier town is both a fairy-tale and a carnival. Drag queens and clowns hang around happily, perpetually dressed for performance. The mayor is a little person who yanks people’s testicles in rebuke when they behave too rudely. Kate Bosworth, as the love interest Lynne, presents a hearty cowgirl on the level of vaudeville, and she “goes undercover” as a brazenly flirtatious prostitute on the slightest provocation (this last event is gratuitous in a quite wrong way, too, but it’s characteristic of the film’s playfulness). Except for its most bombastic moments (such as the Big Action Climax near the end), even the movie’s violence feels innocent and strange. It wobbles between total cardboard unreality and occasional moments of dreamlike conviction—although the former clearly dominates by the end. The sinister colonel who periodically rides into town and menaces people, played by a hilariously odious Danny Huston, personally embodies this tension; he is both a parody of villainous debauchery and its vivid incarnation. A flashback to Lynne’s childhood in which the colonel kills her family and attempts to rape her is especially ambiguous in tone. Each killing is punctuated by a flash of red—we remain in a cartoon, but a deeply troubled one.

The movie’s ending is lousy, as well as inevitable. After all, a movie called The Warrior’s Way is obligated to work out some kind of lofty mythology about what it takes to be a hero, and the one presented here is neither meaningful nor appealing. Lee finally aims for something like the tragic arc of certain classic Westerns and samurai films, in which the hero’s warlike calling requires him to leave behind everything he loves, but the very core of the film rebels at such a pretentious move and drops into total thematic emptiness. Jang ceases to be a laconic warrior whose heart is also warmed by cute babies and hammy cowgirls; he reverts to the initial stereotype of Ninja as a machine of cold prowess, and it seems he will continue to slay hordes of attackers with elegantly bloody swordplay into a bleak forever. The fun of burlesque and the promise of the baby are abandoned for a chic and empty aesthetic of bloodshed. Sentimentality is durable because it is demanding. Like the grace of God, it is both free and costly. You don’t dump a baby for the sake of some lame stoic-hero posture without consequences. The consequence here is that this weirdly personal film about outcasts and victims is finally defined by a violence of monotonous victory.