Tapped Out (2014)

Tapped Out (2014)

 

Starring: Michael Biehn, Cody Hackman, Krzysztof Soszynski, Anderson Silva, Lyoto Machida, Jess Brown, Daniel Faraldo, Nick Bateman, Tom Bolton
Director: Allan Ungar
Action Director: Emilio Chino Ramirez

 

After watching the bottom-of-the-barrel Fight Valley and the bland, mediocre Vale Todo, Tapped Out was something of a breath of fresh air for me. It is not a great film, but it was a perfectly entertaining MMA movie with a good performance from Michael Biehn (always glad to see him in stuff), some decent fight choreography, and a serviceable story. Yes, it does feel a little unoriginal, mixing in plot elements from previous movies like Never Back Down and Kickboxer, but is does so reasonably well.

Young Michael Shaw (Kyle Peacock) is having a good night. He has two loving parents and is being promoted at his dojo—one belt away from getting his black belt. However, his joy is short lived. While returning home, the Shaw family car is best by carjackers, one of whom is a little trigger happy. His dad gets blown away outside the car and the killer decides to off his mom, who’s still in the passenger seat and begging for her life, too. “No witnesses” and all that. Thankfully for Michael, he’s hiding on the ground in the back seat and the killer is too careless to check. Michael makes a break for it once the car arrives at the chop shop, although he does notice that the carjacker has a peculiar tattoo on the back of his neck).

Cut to seven years later, Michael (now played by 5x World Karate Champion Cody Hackman, who also wrote the story for his movie) has become a major-league slacker, organizing high school parties and getting beer for his classmates. When the police break up his latest party, he gets caught by Detective Len (Tom Bolton, “The Haunted Museum” and “Paranormal 911”), who takes him back to his longsuffering grandfather (James Neely). Len warns grandpa that if Michael gets caught again doing this, he’ll have to “go through the system.” We learn the next day at school that Michael is the only senior high school student who’s pushing 20, having flunked his senior year twice now. His principal (The Karate Kid’s Martin Kove) makes him an offer, arranging for him to do community service at his old dojo to help him meet graduation requirements.

Without much choice, Michael heads to the dojo after school, where he meets up with his old sensei, Reggie Munro (Michael Biehn, of Dragon Squad and Shadowguard). Reggie’s a bit of a crusty old man and with his own personal demons relating to past war experience. Michael is initially brought on to clean the floors, polish the trophies, and other menial tasks. When Michael shows a bit of a knack for helping the younger students, Reggie lets him help out as an assistant instructor and later lets him resume his training.

Michael is cleaning up the dojo one evening when he’s visited by Reggie’s niece, Jen (Jess Brown, of Death Down the Aisle and Nightbooks). She takes a liking to Michael and invites him to go see some local MMA with her. The main event is a bout involving a mountain of a man named Dominic Grey (MMA champion Krzysztof Soszynski, of Logan and Immortals). It’s during Grey’s fight that Michael sees a familiar tattoo on the man’s neck. You can see where this is going. He initially tries to go to the police, but he’s a bit too on edge to sit down and wait for a detective to talk to him (although Len eventually re-opens the investigation). He considers going all vigilante on Grey, but stops himself at the last minute. The only path he has, then, is in the ring…

When I watched and reviewed Never Back Down many years ago, I summarized the film as “The Karate Kid, but with lesbian make-out scenes.” In the case of Tapped Out, it is “Never Back Down, but without the pandering.” Like the early tournament films of the late 80s and early 90s, there is a revenge element motivating our main protagonist, although the initial crime wasn’t committed in the ring, like in films such as Kickboxer. The Never Back Down bit about the teacher not wanting to teach any student who uses his skills for gain is present, although Michael Biehn’s Reggie relents when he finds out what Michael’s true motives are. And like Vale Todo and The Undisputed 2 (and most kung fu films from the late 1970s), you have the scene where our hero has to train in a second style—Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in this case—in order to defeat his opponents. Where Vale Todo had Fernando Soluço, here we have Anderson Silva (Invincible Dragon) and Lyoto Machida (Unrivaled).

I would say this last plot point represent the film’s biggest failing. Like Vale Todo, our protagonist as a stupid-short amount of time to learn Jiu-Jitsu before having to put his skills to the test. In Vale Todo, Carlos Vallencia had three months. In this movie, Michael Shaw has three weeks. It was a little easier to swallow in Vale Todo because the main character was already something of a hardened fellow with his fair share of life-and-death street brawls. In Tapped Out, our character hasn’t formally trained in seven years and doesn’t have any real-life fighting experience. As a result, it strains credibility that he would be able to really up his game to the level he does in that short of time.

Speaking of fighting experience, the fight scenes were staged by Emilio “Chino” Ramirez, who appears to have been a silver medalist at the 2022 Ontario Open International Jiu-Jitsu Championship—I assume his fight record is more extensive than that. He also starred in the Canadian-Chinese fantasy film Fallen Angel, although I know nothing about that project. What I can say is that the fights are leagues better than what I saw in Fight Valley and Vale Todo, which I watched the same week. The choreography is solid by MMA movie standards (unlike Fight Valley) and the camera lets us see what’s happening (unlike Vale Todo). We’re not quite talking Flash Point-level stuff, but it gets the job done. All the fighters, including Cody Hackman, get a few good fights to show off their skills. It still doesn’t convince me that our protagonist can beat a man-mountain like Krzysztof Soszynski, but it gets the job done for the most part (and even that is more a story issue, then a fight staging one). I still haven’t seen Warrior, but I easily would rank this above Fight Valley; Vale Todo; Fighting; and Unrivaled. And that’s not “great,” but it’s better than nothing.