High Kick Girl (2009)

High Kick Girl (2009)
Japanese Title: ハイキック・ガール！
Translation: High Kick Girl

 

Starring: Rina Takeda, Tatsuya Naka, Ryuki Takahashi
Director: Fuyuhiko Nishi
Action Director: Fuyuhiko Nishi

 

High-Kick Girl is a sad case. It’s one of those movies that I’d really like to recommend, but I just can’t bring myself to do so. After all, the lead actress, Rina Takeda, is the successor to Fist of Legend’s Shinobu Nakayama in terms of sheer adorable. You know, the type of girl whom you just want to give a giant bear hug and pinch her cheeks until the cows come home. She also is an honest-to-mergatroy martial artist, and not some AV Idol who trained for a few weeks with the fight choreographer after coming home from the set of some movie with a title like Spit-Swap Seduction. Moreover, Tatsuya Naka seems to be a real martial artist as well and sells his karate and fight philosophy quite well throughout the film. This is good.

But then you get to everything else about the movie and it all goes to hell. Production values, plotting and script, photography, editing…there’s nothing about this movie that works beyond the cuteness of the actress and her inspired ability to kick a**.

The story goes like this. Takeda plays Kei Tsuchiya (no relation to actor Yoshio Tsuchiya, who always played a bad guy in old sci-fi films—just claiming my film geek prize here), a brown belt in karate who’s upset that her sensei refuses to give her a black belt. In order to prove to him and to herself that she’s strong enough for a black belt, she goes around challenging other black belts to fights, which she handily wins. However, her sensei is more of a kata, or forms, person. He feels that mastering the forms is the best way to understand the essence of karate, and constantly points out that Kei’s forms work isn’t up to snuff.

So what does Kei do? She tries to join a band of martial arts assassins known as the Destroyers. What she doesn’t know is that their leader (or one of them—the film fails to explain the hierarchy of this organization) has just gotten out of jail after 15 years and wants revenge against Kei’s teacher, who practically took down the organization back in the day. The Destroyers—who are a bunch of a losers, considering that they couldn’t find the guy in 15 years, despite the fact that he’s training a regular high school girl and a bunch of other students—use Kei’s initiation fight as a way to get the sensei’s attention. Things are ripe for a final confrontation.

The movie runs about 76 minutes, although I’m sure that there’s probably barely over an hour of actual footage, but we’ll talk about that in a moment. The premise of the movie is pretty dumb, but as a fan of martial arts movies, I’m used to that. But the execution of said premise…that where things really get sticky. As I mentioned before, the characters constantly hint at something that happened 15 years before, but we never find out exactly what happened. What brought the sensei into conflict with the Destroyers? Who’s actually in charge—the big guy who’s always talking, or the guy with a goatee who just got out of prison? Does it actually matter? None of it makes much sense.

Nor can we make much of sense out of Kei’s involvement with the Destroyers. These people are walking around beating people to death with their bare hands, including innocent bystanders, but where are the police. Moreover, how does Kei get a hold of them in the first place? Do they advertise on the internet? And how could she possibly think that joining a team of karate assassins is a good way of proving herself to her master? Participating in an underground martial arts tournament, I could at least imagine that. But karate killers? Uh…yeah. And there’s that part at the end where it seems like the leader of the Destroyers is trying to egg on Kei’s sensei by telling him that his dear pupil has joined the Dark Side, but Kei’s lying face down on the ground with a Destroyer’s foot planted on the base of her neck, ready to break it. I think a smarter script would actually had Kei perform a few hits for the Destroyers before being tricked into facing her master, instead of “You passed the test to join us, but actually it’s a ruse. Hey sensei, look, this girl we’re about to kill joined us!”

So that really just leaves the action to salvage the film. For the most part, the fighting doesn’t disappoint. Rina Takeda looks excellent in her several fight scenes and the girl can kick. She doesn’t quite get as flashy in her moves as, say, the girl who plays her sister in KG:Karate Girl, but I don’t think that’s the point. Her kicks are high, fast and crisp and that’s all that matters. Her best fight is her initiation duel, which pits her against a bunch of female assassins in navy blue sailor suits and some other random thugs. My only complaint about Takeda’s performance is that she takes a back seat for a good part of the finale, leaving the fight in the hands of her sensei, played by Tatsuya Naka. It would’ve been cool if they had Takeda throwing down with that female Destroyer, Choka, who showed up in an earlier fight sequence, tearing a** with her front flip heel smashes. Sadly, Choka disappears from the movie after that neat fight.

The editing is what undermines the action. About 85% of the action on display gets an instant replay, either in slow motion, from another camera angle, or both. And we’re not talking just the flashier aerial kicks and stuff like that. We’re talking entire patches of choreography, which gets really distracting. Takeda will take out two or three opponents, and then a fourth opponent attacks her, and suddenly we’re back to where she fought the previous three lackeys. It’s jarring and gets old very, very quickly. Instant replays are good for “money moves” like whirlwind kicks and Legendary Superkicker Hwang Jang Lee’s signature moves, especially when you have a good editor behind the camera. Look at the whirlwind kick that Jackie Chan (or Yuen Biao or Chin Kar-Lok) performs at the end of Dragons Forever. It’s shown in slow motion and immediately again at normal speed. It’s edited in a way that it looks like the greatest kick ever delivered in cinema and packs a punch almost 30 years later. But to do entire sequences of hits, kicks and blocks on instant replay feels like unnecessary padding.

In the end, your ability to filter out plot holes the size of Amy Yip’s chest, look past the static camera work and limited sets that suggest that the filmmakers had one or two dojos and a high school after hours to film in, and generosity regarding abused editing techniques during the fighting will determine how much you’ll get out of the admittedly strong action sequences. Takeda does great for a freshman effort, but this feels like a freshman effort for everybody behind the camera, which really shows. KG: Karate Girl, this film’s follow up, felt more like a real movie, even if the production values were still a little low. That said, I praise the filmmakers for their sincerity: they honestly want to make an entertaining martial arts movie for fans, and not a cynical cash-grab to serve as sleazy fan service for Western otakus. Perhaps that alone should be enough for many besides the action itself.