Starring: Brandon Gaynes, Keith Vitali, Patrick Lung Kong, Faye Yu Feihong, Kelly Gallant, Chuck Jeffreys, Rob Van Dam, Cliff Lenderman
Director: Lucas Lowe
Action Director: Tong Leung-Siu-Hung
A lot of people think that American martial arts cinema took a turn for the better when Jet Li and Jackie Chan started making started starring in Hollywood films and action directors like Corey Yuen and Yuen Woo-Ping started choreographing blockbuster films like Kill Bill, The Matrix trilogy, and The Transporter films. However, if I were to choose the best thing that ever happened to American martial arts films, I'd choose Tony Leung #3*.
Tony Leung is probably best known for being the brother of Leung Siu-Lung, aka Bruce Liang (of Call Me Dragon and Kung Fu Hustle fame). Tony Leung was more of an action director than an actor, although he got his fair share of onscreen bootage in a few films. He never got a whole lot of respect in Hong Kong, despite the fact that he directed the action to a number of fan favorites, including The Magic Crystal (1986), Angel (1987), and In the Line of Duty III (1988). Strangely enough, despite the superior quality of the fight scenes in those movies, he never got the recognition he deserved until this year when he and Sammo Hung won the HK Film Award for Best Action Design for Ip Man.
Tony directed and choreographed this film, which is about a shady UFC-type martial arts show. One of the best parts about this film is that it's set in an alternate universe quite different from the one we're used to. After all, is it really possible for a bunch of TV show personalities to beat people up in public and never get caught by the police? How many older Chinese people walked around US cities in 1995 looking like they came off the set of a 1970s kung fu movie? Would a young man really become a media hero and be recognized by an entire city after beating up a few thugs? How many drug dealers and whatnot prefer to use fisticuffs in scuffles rather than say, guns?
Jack Cody (Brandon Gaynes) is a young man who's a huge fan of UFC/professional wrestling-type show on TV called "Superfights". Cody is an aspiring martial artist who spends his time at work beating up dummies and turning his workspace into a Jackie Chan stunt group training center. He dreams of being a regular on "Superfights", despite the protests of his widowed mother (why don't these guys ever have two-parent families?). His dream comes true when he saves a girl (Faye Yu of The Joy Luck Club) at the ATM from a bunch of thugs. His fight is caught on the security camera and he's instantly a media hero.
Robert Sawyer (Keith Vitali, of American Kickboxer), the founder of "Superfights", decides that bringing Jack Cody onto his team is just the publicity he needs for his show. Cody is brought on and is taught by the rather unsexy female fighter Angel, who not only starts to train him, but tries to seduce him as well. He soon becomes a success on the show, although a number of things start to happen that make him question what's going on. First of all, all of the participants are required to take a pill that the workers claim is a vitamin. Second, Cody's initial fights seem like such easy wins that he begins to wonder if he's actually winning or not. Finally, a guy in a ninja outfit tells him that Sawyer is crooked and for him to get out while the going is good.
Cody keeps on fighting, but he does get off the pills. He starts romancing the girl that he saved at the ATM, whose grandfather (Patrick Lung of Black Mask) happens to be a tai chi master. Cody begins to train in tai chi, and his newfound martial arts skills make up for the fact that his muscle mass isn't getting any bigger. Let me note here that I'm glad to see an American movie that treats tai chi as the bad-a** martial art that it is and not simply an exercise.
Nonetheless, things to start messy after a while. One night, during a fight, one of the fighters goes off his rocker and tries to kill his opponent (Wrestling fans well probably note that the guy is played by Rob Van Dam). Cody finds himself in hot water after he refuses to throw a fight when Sawyer asks him to. Sawyer offers to let him make amends by sending him on a strong arm mission to extort money from a Chinese restaurant (notice that all of the employees know kung fu). Cody finally finds out that one of the fighters is actually a DEA agent and soon Cody finds himself fighting not only for his own life, but for...*yawn*...his loved ones as well.
Yup, all of the clichés are here. The underground fight sequences. The crooked fight promotor. The evil female on the inside who slowly falls for our hero, but who loses out to more "pure" girl. The kidnapping of the hero's loved ones. The old Asian master who trains our hero. I was just counting the time until the love interest got kidnapped, to be honest.
The acting is pretty bad by most standards. Brandon Gaynes reaches Loren Avedon heights (lows) of bad overacting early on when Sawyer invites him to be a Superfighter and he starts yelling and screaming and jumping around the room like some sort of mental patient. The mother is particularly terrible actress, too. Her attempts to sound like a concerned parent fall flatter a bottle of Dr. Pepper left out of the fridge for two weeks.
Nevertheless, the fights scenes are fast frequent and are up to the high standards that Tony Leung set for himself in King of the Kickboxers (1990) and No Retreat, No Surrender III. The style of choreography is mainly modern kickboxing, with the emphasis of flashy tae kwon do kicking and karate-influenced punching. The kicks performed all the actors are just magnificent. There is some wing chun training early on. The tai chi that Gaynes performs in his later fights are integrated well with the more modern choreography, so that it doesn't look like he's suddenly starring in a traditional kung fu film instead of a modern tournament movie. Keith Vitali gets a pretty great showcase--far better than I've seen him do in Wheels on Meals and Revenge of the Ninja. One can easily see that Leung was influenced by the success of Drunken Master 2 (1994), as Vitali tries to do the crazy kicking that Ken Low did in that film. He pulls it off rather well. The fighting here easily blows most of Jet Li's and Jackie Chan's American films out of the water...not to mention The Matrix trilogy, Kill Bill, and those recent underground fighting films (Never Back Down and Fighting).
The thing that surprised me the most about this movie is that it pulled off a PG-13 rating. The only non-R thing about this movie was that the profanity was toned down quite a bit. There's some very mild sexuality and some brief nudity. There's a scene where one guy is seen snorting up lines of cocaine. But the bizarre part of it is all is that this movie is plain brutal. It is arguably more violent than the likes of Bloodsport and Kickboxer. The fights are pretty intense, full of bloody noses and wounds. There are some broken limbs here and there. Women are beaten in several scenes. Several people are beaten to a pulp and then die with blood flowing out of their mouths. Heck, there's one scene where a guy's head is shoved into a ceiling fan and you can see part of his head splatter onto the wall. There are Hong Kong films that got R ratings when they came to the States that aren't even half as bloody as this film.
Highly recommended for fans of cheesy movies and good bootage.
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