The Mortal Instruments is the story of a normal girl who discovers she has world saving powers and incredible eyebrows. She is drawn into an ancient battle between good and evil that will decide the fate of all mankind. She also has to deal with the obligatory YA love triangle involving mysterious men who glower whilst wearing hoodies.

On this blog we’ve covered the world’s first love quadrangle featuring three people and a voice over in The Host. Also, Co-writer John just examined the Gothic YA story Beautiful Creatures. We realize that we are not the target demographic in the same way young teenagers wouldn’t appreciate To the Wonder or any Scott Adkins direct to DVD film. However, we watch everything in our attempt to be well-rounded cinephiles. Also, I enjoy torturing John with movies he vowed to never watch. See review for Blue Crush 2.

Instead of picking holes in the film I want to discuss how it uses the familiar YA tropes. Here are some of the usual suspects

1. There will be a love triangle. Yep. It happens. Check out this line

Next time, it might be a nice idea to mention that you already have a man in your bed, so we can avoid such uncomfortable situations.

2. Bad CGI will be used.  There is a scene where CCH Pounder turns into a demon while Bach is playing and it is kinda cool. She wrecks shop then gets stabbed by a guy in a hoodie.

3. There will be pouting.  It will look and sound like this “he is my best friend but that guy with the hoodie is so intense and mysterious.”

4. Expository dialogue will be used. For instance, “There’s a map inside your head, Clary. YOU are the key to our survival.”

5. Somebody in the crew will be jealous of the love triangle. His name is Alec Lightwood and he says this:

She’s going to get us all killed.

6. There will be more hoodies. Say hello to the Warlock.

7. Somebody overacts whilst knowing they are in a bad YA book adaptation. Thank you Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

The Mortal Instruments is about the age-old story of Shadowhunters (good guys), vampires, warlocks, werewolves and demons. They all wear leather clad costumes and some want world domination. It is true kitchen sink young adult film making. There is a love triangle, jealous sidekick and lots of good-looking people standing around for publicity shots.

Lilly Collins is the sweet girl with paint stained overalls that is brought into the dangerous world of demon wrangling. Unbeknownst to her she has the ability to “see stuff.” Her ability gets her mom kidnapped and then she is attacked by demon dogs. A mysterious stranger in a hoodie saves her and she begins her tutelage to become a Shadowhunter who wears short black dresses.

After about 30 minutes of expository dialogue the well quaffed team start searching for her mother. They engage in battles with vampires, demons and bouncers who don’t believe they are 21.

So, what are Shadowhunters and what do they do? A character named Hodge “expository” Starkweather does his best to explain it to you. 

Half angel, Half human, Beings of immense power, strong enough to restore balance and protect the world in a war against evil. Everything you’ve heard about monsters, about nightmares, legends whispered around campfires. All the stories are true.

The problem is that there are only four Shadowhunters left and they are understandably all about self-preservation. This new addition adds jealousy (one guy loves Hoodie jace) and proves how little a wardrobe the female member owns (she is always called a stripper).

After several double crosses the main baddie played by Jonathan Rhys Myers hits the earth and attempts to unleash all the demons. So, the good guys make a last stand to overcome the overacting bad guy. It is basically everything you’ve ever seen or read before. Eventually, Lilly realizes her powers and a sassy palm (with a wind machine) saves the day.

The Mortal Instruments is for people who love YA adaptations that give you nothing new. It is like the Hangover 2 of comedy or Clash of the Titans of action. It is the safe choice that isn’t as insane as Twilight or actually good like the Hunger Games.

Enjoy the hoodies! Watch out for the sassy palm! Master the “glower” face.

In a world full of remakes/sequels/reboots/prequels/spin-offs I love that Getaway exists. It is a car chase film that takes place in Bulgaria and features Selena Gomez talking about hacking computers whilst wearing a hoodie. It was universally panned (3% RT) and the nicest thing said about it was this:

This latter-day B movie can be rather fun in its preposterousness and bargain-basement style.

The Getaway is the story an ex-race car driver cruising around Bulgaria trying to save his wife. Selena Gomez gets involved and Jon Voight has another silly accent. On paper the movie makes sense. It was going for character actor + attractive pop star + nice car = fast paced ADD car mayhem that can be marketed internationally.

The problem is that the pace, editing and plot are all mind numbing. It got to the point where I lost track of the plot and starting counting how much it would cost to repair all the vehicular Hawke damage (probably like $8 million). Also, the costuming felt like an afterthought as Hawke is forced to wear a silly blue hat.

The silly hat is a staple of bad cinema. For instance, poor Julianne Moore was saddled with a bad hat in Next

Getaway really goes for it and puts a bad hat and hoodie on Selena Gomez.

The editing can best be described as “keyboard smashing.” Keyboard smashing works in music videos that need to pack everything into three minutes. However, the quick cuts in Getaway result in zero tension and a whole lot of confusion. The only cool moment of the film is a two-minute tracking shot of Hawke’s Shelby Cobra zooming through strategically driven vehicles.

I felt bad for the cops who were chasing Hawke. Imagine you are a traffic cop in Bulgaria and were tasked with chasing a Shelby Cobra around alleys, underpasses and busy streets. Your day will be wrecked and your reputation hurt. Hawke is responsible for destroying every cop car in Bulgaria and is incredibly lucky he didn’t crush hundreds of Bulgarians. The unlucky cops are doing their best to apprehend a madman that is careening all over their city. The majority of the car chases end with police cars flipping, rolling, crashing and careening.

The most frustrating aspect is the plot. The bad guy is one of those masterminds who stares at three computers and has everything planned out in advance. He knows all and is a super jerk. How does he know that Hawke won’t crunch an innocent bystander while careening around an ice rink? How does he not know that Selena Gomez will dupe him?. Jon Voight gives this computer villain another weird accent and I kept hoping he would accidentally use his Anaconda accent and adopt this face while staring at the monitor.

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I get why Hawke took the role. He is known mostly for his sensitive generation-X portrayals and has since branched out into films like What Doesn’t Kill You, Sinister, The Purge and now Getaway. He wants to stay relevant with today’s youth. However, he got himself into a film where his character’s name is Brent Magna.

Between Before Midnight and Getaway Hawke had the highest and lowest rated films of 2013. That is why I like him. There is no pattern and he will continue to pop up in bad films wearing silly hats.

The Getaway is bad. However, Getaway was unexpected. I applaud that.

“You’re about to jet off to a country you’ve never been to, with a language you do not speak.”

Runner Runner is a film where everything is explained to you. When it isn’t explained Timberlake asks “What is this?” or “what are we doing here?” Then, Affleck’s character Ivan explains everything and Timberlake says “What is wrong with you?”

The tagline from the poster is “You have no idea who you’re playing with.” The problem is you know exactly who you are playing with. There is nothing new about the characters and it all builds towards double crosses, triple crosses and one more double cross showing how “smart” the main character is. The writing isn’t simply on the wall it is in block letters displayed for everyone to see. Thus, there is zero tension and instead the whole thing becomes kinda funny. Where else will you hear Affleck tell Timberlake:

This is the gambling business in Costa Rica. Occasionally you get punched in the face.

Runner Runner tells the story of a bunch of dudes (and one lady. Gemma Arterton you are better than this) entrenched in the high stakes world of online gambling. Basically, these people are rich but choose to be super rich. They enjoy bikini clad women, stacks of cash and play on the basketball teams that they own. They also have every chance to get away with their money but choose to make more (cue the face punching). The problems are self inflicted and you never care as death via crocodile becomes a reality. Ben Affleck evens warns Timberlake when he says:

If you want a a safer job go work for the post office. If you want a clear conscience go start a charity. If you want your own F**king island and your boss says you have to take a beating. Take it (cue more face punching).

Justin Timberlake is woefully miscast. His character is supposed to be ridiculously smart (we are told this a lot) but comes across as kinda dim (For a smart kid you do some really dumb stuff). His motor mouthed skills worked in Social Network but here he has to navigate tough, smart, dumb, confused and confident with no help from the script (cue expository dialogue to tell us everything!). He is too likable to be a jerk and too manicured to be tough. The character should have been a mousy/intelligent man who loves the dangerous world because he never would have experienced it anywhere else. Timberlake’s character could easily go back to school and live a good life.

Ben Affleck seems to be having a good time as a deadly man who loves crocodiles and hair product. Critics were divided on the character. They either appreciated the performance or called his character a “ludicrously preened tosser.” Either way, he is the only good part of Runner Runner because he breaks the generic mode and comes across as a new age bro-villain.

The director Brad Furman also made the wonderful Lincoln Lawyer. It was a grimy delight that revived Matthew McConaughey’s career and was a sleeper hit. Lawyer’s old school vibe isn’t here as everything looks too glossy and the material feels too written. I was disappointed as the negative reviews poured in and the general consensus was that the film was “clunky.” It wants to be an R rated film but feels like a PG-13 flick.

Runner Runner is not a good film. It tells you everything, tells you again and builds to a climax so easy you slap your head. However, I would love to see a bro-Batman ruling the streets of Gotham.

Spoilers Abound! 

Pompeii tells the age old story of love in the time of ash and lava. This sweeping love story from the director of Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil and Three Musketeers is as subtle as Vesuvius and as intelligent as the rocks spewing from it. Pompeii is a dumbed down Titanic that totally redeems itself via odd directing choices and accidental hilarity.

Pompeii is a quirky little thing that is loaded with unintentional laughs, wonky accents (British? Irish? Italian? I think Sutherland made up an accent) and the greatest bro-hug ever. Imagine if  2012, Gladiator, Bloodrayne, Titanic, Romeo & Juliet, Tristan & Isolde, Centurion, In the Name of the King and The Three Musketeers were mixed together then rewritten by Paul W.S. Anderson. Pompeii is an amalgamation of illogical weirdness and irrelevant fluff.

The plot is all happenstance and features a meet cute via horse neck snapping. The two lovers rarely spend time together and the only moment they are alone results in painful yet quick healing lashes. Eventually, things go boom, revenge is had, peasants get crunched and only Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje seems to know he is in a bad movie.

Take a look at the above poster. The two leads are having a smooching session amid chaos. I understand they are a tragic couple. However, I 100% believe they could’ve survived had they not sauntered so much. If they would have jogged away we could have enjoyed Pompeii 2: Why did we vacation near Mount St. Helens? Other characters in similar films survived by hightailing it to safety. In the photos for Dante’s Peak and Volcano the characters are running or looking concerned while walking away from the deadly fire.

Now, take another look at Pompeii’s couple as they look relaxed in the chaos.

These people survived by running!

These two weren’t lucky enough to have running in the script.

Paul W.S. Anderson has had a fruitful career in Hollywood by directing money making hokum (I’ve watched them all and keep coming back). His highest rated film on Rotten Tomatoes is the 43% Death Race. His other films The Three Musketeers, Resident Evil, Event Horizon, Mortal Kombat, Soldier, AVP and now Pompeii have all felt like other better films. There are moments of creative talent (Horizon hell scenes, Orlando Bloom’s hair in Musketeers, light grid scene in Resident)  but for the most part Anderson has simultaneously  annoyed and captured the nerd zeitgeist.

Sidenote: Gotta love Bloom’s hair.

Pompeii feels like a step in the wrong direction. Never before have Anderson’s films felt so unintelligible or unintentionally hilarious. It felt more like In the Name of the King (Never a good thing to be compared to a Uwe Boll film) then Tristan & Isolde. I am going out on a limb here but I’d wager Kit Harrington wins the hair battle between he and James Franco.

Pompeii is pure dumb that is punctuated by really bad decisions. It is an enjoyable romp that will make perfect FX foder for insomniacs and college students for years to come. It was never meant to be good. It was only meant to entertain. It may be a step back for Anderson but at least we now have the visual of peasants being clunked on the heads by tiny rocks in the canon of film. 

There is a momentum changing moment in Oldboy when Brolin is released from captivity after twenty years. He emerges from a large box and chases down a mysterious woman. He stops her violently in front of some football players and it all goes wrong. The players react to the male/female violence and immediately get the living sh** kicked out of them. The scene is brutal, unnecessary and likely results in one persons death. The fight establishes the toughness of the title character but also proves how unnecessary the film is.

I won’t make this an original vs. remake write-up. However, in the original the recently released main character finds some street punks and gives them a good beating. The moment is funny, unexpected and you don’t mind that some hoods got their face punched. The moment worked because the film is so cartoonish and you didn’t feel like innocent bystanders got destroyed. The remake features total stereotypes receiving WAY too much punishment for trying to do something good. I think Spike Lee tried to do something good but ended up like the bloodied folk. He fought an uphill battle that was bound to disappoint due to directing choices and studio meddling.  The A.V. Club’s A.A. Dowd sums it up well:

Park’s film was wildly irreverent, grinning manically in the face of torture, suicide, incest, and other taboos. Lee’s Oldboy is a more somber affair. That said, maybe straight-faced isn’t the right approach for such an over-the-top narrative, pulled from a Japanese manga and built around one of the most elaborate revenge schemes in recent movie history. Park knew he was making pulp, and directed accordingly.

Oldboy does not feel like a completed film. It is overly edited and doesn’t come close to the slow burn of the original. It starts off well enough as it expands the prison sentence to twenty years and gives us more time in the hotel room. However, once he is loose the movie plows forward and loses any creative nuance that was created. My biggest problem with the film is the director’s cut excuse used by Spike Lee.  The film had many hurdles to clear (insane fanboys, incest, hammer fights) and that wasn’t helped by a mythical three-hour cut.

Both Spike Lee and Brolin commented on how the three-hour cut is much better than what was dumped into the cinemas. However, the remake shouldn’t have been three hours. Park Chan-Wook told the story in two hours and it was a beautifully insane cult classic. Thus, why make a longer remake of a two-hour movie? Did Spike really think audiences would sit through a 180 minute remake of an incredibly violent cult classic?

There was bound to be cuts and the film suffered. The original fight scene which was filmed in a single take is now chopped up and features bad guys who only want to get beat up. It is poorly set up, sped up and sacharine compared to the original. Lee wanted it to be bigger (three floors) and Brolin was pushed to his physical limit (five weeks of prep) but it was hindered by cheekily dressed villains, brutality and a studio edit.

Brutality is not a substitute for quality. Oldboy’s brutality felt organic to the story. However, the violence in the remake feels shoehorned in. It never feels right. The original set a cornball/bonkers atmosphere that felt like a parallel world which made the violence palatable. The remake feels grounded in realism with the occasional sped up action scene. There are moments when Brolin literally throws men on their heads and you wonder how he acquired such brutal techniques.

The other problem with the film is Sharlto Copley’s questionable villain.

His accent is odd, motivation wonky and scenes were cut down (thank you three-hour cut). He is not a threat and pales in comparison to Ji-Tae Yu who owned the screen as the twisted baddie of the original. His character was sleek, suave, petty and believably diabolical. A good hero needs a good villain and Lee Woo-jin was a great bad guy. Copley is nothing but facial hair, scars and a weak back story. The bad guy barely registers and that is terrible thing when the movie is all about a man getting revenge.

The Oldboy remake fought a losing battle. I’m sure the three-hour cut is better but I think Spike Lee should have focused more on character and plot instead of making things bigger and better. More can sometimes be less and that is evident in the Oldboy remake.

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Same story different setting. The Marked Ones tells the story of several friends who have to battle that dang Paranormal Activity coven. The jerky witches are at it again and their never ending quest of standing around looking menacing has become boring. The world of white bread witches blending with Mexican mysticism could have added a new wrinkle to the battle of good vs. evil vs. static camera. However, it can’t avoid all of the same traps and returns to the well once again.

The best parts of the film are the naturalistic performances, change of scenery and usage of GoPros. Gone are the big houses and we are welcome into the world of apartment living in Oxnard, California. Our three heroes are recent high school grads who get entangled in witches, blood eggs, obligatory basements and mysticism.

The kids have potential and are likable but the script fails them as the stock scares add up to laughable heights. You know the creators have stopped trying when there is a ten minute segment involving a scantily clad woman and a predictable scare. The scene does nothing to further the film and instead plays off every horror cliché in the history of the planet.

You hope naively that the freshness of the first film will return and a new menace will appear. Will the two forces battle? Will Toby the pesky demon meet his match? Nope. You get the same stuff with a different cast. People are marked, the camera goes everywhere and it ends exactly like the third and fourth film. Cut, paste and make millions in box office off of a tiny budget.

The insult to horror lovers is the director/writer had a chance to bring back the innovation and make tons of money. However, unlike Final Destination 5 which felt fresh you get dumb villains and recycled plots points. The original Paranormal Activty featured a bad guy who was mysterious, dangerous and brutal. I remember the simple shot of footprints put me on edge because it was so minimal. Less is more in horror.

The static camera and aura of evil scared the crap out of audiences and the movie made tons of money. However, nothing gold can stay and the series has been strip mined of everything that made it good (Read horror czars review of the series here). The evil has been explained and good villains have been replaced by stereotypical witches whom offer nothing in the way of excitement. The finale of Marked Ones is a groan fest that becomes unintentionally funny. I never thought I’d see a screaming witch get blown away by a shotgun toting gang member. The way in which the women sneak around in the beginning is betrayed in the finale as they scream and run while holding knives over their heads. All their mysterious work culminates in twenty feet of running and yelling? The whole thing felt lazy and it made me think of this scene from Austin Powers.

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You get to a point in your life when you tire of jerky witches and the evil things they do to people. You also grow tired of the same stock ending of creepy women surrounding a house whilst our heroes questionably lock themselves inside it. What brought me back to the dying series was the change of scenery and hope for something new. New = Money. The same = diminishing returns. The creators have ignored the newness and the box office has dropped. The films are profitable but imagine how much money they’d make if they were better.

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones is a simple cash grab that could have expanded upon its world via Mexican mysticism. However, it brings back those dang witches and the pesky Toby. Don’t watch it. Rent the original. Or check out Troll Hunter. It has nothing to do with witches but it is original and fun.

My Jason Statham movie poster theory has been given added credibiliy with Homefront. Here is my theory.

Overcoat posters = 70.25% on Rotten Tomatoes. This total is understandable because three out of the four overcoat films (Snatch, Lock Stock, Bank Job) are really good. It also shows that critics enjoy Statham as an everyday bloke whom speaks more than monosyllabic sentences.

Suit/Cardigan/shirt posters = 40% Rotten Tomatoes score. Crank and Transporter buoyed this score because they were solid films that weren’t wrecked by the Statham suit persona.

The Rotten Tomatoes average for Homefront was 42%. The lack of overcoat doesn’t lie.

The reasons to watch this film are many and that is why I ignored my theory. Stallone wrote the script, Statham wears an odd wig and James Franco plays a boat mechanic/meth cook named Gator Bodine. However, much like Stallone’s Bullett to the Head the film is a massive bore with lots of “f” bombs sprinkled in. It is a murky little thing that plays equal parts shlocky and confounding. Homefront pulled off the impossible by making Jason Statham battling James Franco boring.

Here is the plot. Statham moves to a small town because his cover an as undercover biker was blown. Statham’s kid beats up a bully. Kate Bosworth is annoyed that her bully son was hurt. Statham then beats up her husband. Bosworth gets Gator Bodine into the fray. Then, Gator convinces former meth addict Wynonna Ryder to get a motorcycle gang involved. Frank Grillo shows up and tries to kill Statham. Statham kills everybody and beats the snot out of Gator Bodine.

The biggest problem with the film is the script. It was written ten years ago and was meant to be a starring vehicle for Stallone. However, the Rocky and Rambo sequels hit big and it was put on the back burner until Sly gave the script to Statham. Homefront plays like an 80s film that is missing the extreme violence, muscles and gratuitous nudity of its forebearers. It piles on the melodrama and plays like a diet cola revenge film. Instead of going full bonkers it plays everything painfully straight.  The script asks for you to ignore copious coincidences (the coincidences in The Family are much better) and wants you to believe that Franco is a worthy adversary for a guy who beat up 30 people whilst covered in motor oil.

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The people wanted Statham spin kicking James Franco into oblivion and they got something else. Homefront could have been a beautiful oddity that gets by on personality and not logic. However, it is so devoid of life it makes you want to watch something else. The casting was inspired but was let down by a sleepwalking cast and drab direction.

Don’t watch Homefront. Check out Redemption on Netflix. Stath actually tries to emote and the whole thing is odd in a good way. Also, if you haven’t watched Snatch, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels or Bank Job check them out now.

MY CALL: More like an ill-written soap opera with a few fights than anything resembling an action movie, this flick squandered Cynthia Rothrock’s talents to an appalling degree.  MORE MOVIES LIKE Outside the Law:  Probably any Cynthia Rothrock movie from the 80s or maaaaybe early 90s would be better than this.  However, I strongly recommend NOT watching Night Vision (1997). If you’re in the mood for a proper Bad Movie Tuesday I’d have to recommend you go with Dolph Lundgren, a case of beer and your best bros.  Perhaps The Elementary Stylings of Kindergarten Cop 2 or Dolph Lundgren and the Curse of the Shark Lake.

I recently decided I wanted to watch a bunch of Cynthia Rothrock (China O’Brien, Undefeatable) movies. Well guess what?  That’s surprisingly not easy to do.  As it turns out just about none of her movies are affordable on Amazon to buy except for her late 90s direct-to-video stuff and similarly her older stuff is nowhere to be found on Amazon Video or Netflix.  You can watch Night Vision (1997) for free with Amazon Prime, but I wouldn’t recommend it!  There’s a reason it’s available and her better movies aren’t.

Still in great shape at 45 years old, queen of martial arts Rothrock plays secret agent Julie Cosgrove and the dialogue couldn’t be more rigid. It’s incredibly obvious that this is her last mission because she just won’t shut up about it–blabbing on and on about how she wants to get married and have a regular life with her secret agent partner and his immaculate hair.  The conversation is so smiley and casual you’d think they were on a brunch date and not a covert mission in Colombia.  But no, it’s go time.  And her partner strolls across the sunny South American street in his upper-middle class outfit swinging an assault rifle at his side like he was a British dignitary with a cane.  Not since In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds (2011) or Night Vision (1997) can I recall even a Bad Movie Tuesday so poorly written.

After watching the first few minutes I had to check and confirm the release date was, in fact, from this century! This felt like something from 1991 like an episode of Silk Stalkings or some made-for-TV drivel of decades past.  But no, it’s from 2002.

Spoiler alert: her partner with the great hair bites it when some sort of double cross transpires…it’s incredibly unclear. When she calls in to whatever nonsense agency she works for, they’re shocked (even upset) that she’s still alive.

The action in this is upsettingly bad in the early fights of the movie. They cast the queen of martial arts, but the remaining cast of goons are so inept in terms of combat choreography that when they fight she is limited to throwing one single simple kick per shot.  So if she hits a guy four times in 16 seconds, expect to see four 4-second cuts ineptly edited together.  We have an ace martial artist capable of so much, yet she looks no better at fighting than an extra from Starsky and Hutch.  These fighting scenes are to Rothrock what a limp dorsal fin is to Shamu; just plain sad.  Kind of like how Dolph Lundgren did zero punching in Shark Lake (2015), which also featured dorsal fins and a completely wasted bad ass action movie star.

Thankfully, later she faces some bad guys who can throw a spin kick of their own. They try to keep things edgy with some chain-fighting, although it’s nothing to Lucy Liu vs Ray Park in Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever (2002).  It remains pretty bad, but a more “acceptable” level of bad loaded with kicks to the face…LOADS of face kicks for everyone!  The fights do seem to improve as the movie progresses.  However, the fights never reach the “90s Van Damme” level of quality.

The lines…wow, sooooo witty. “You read Chinese?//Enough to order take out.”  Loads of bad layer-caked over more bad with bad icing.  The exposition burns my ears as the dialogue explains everything that happens as if you weren’t just watching it happen yourself. And evidently this is serious–you can tell by the “international factor” typical of 80s-90s action flicks.  We go from a double-cross in Colombia to Chinese goods being smuggled into south Florida by the Colombian mob to make some sort of super designer drug.  Of course she just stumbled across this while trying to lay low in a random spot in Florida.  The story is a bit too ambitious and reaches too far too often with no real rationale or payoff.

Director Jorge Montesi (Omen IV and loads of action TV shows) has made a lot of direct-to-TV movies and, as such, has a solid respect for simplicity.  Take this film.  After fleeing Colombia, agent Cosgrave buys a car, a week’s worth of groceries and a dog all at the same place.  Oh, and reconnects with some Colombian cartel shenanigans just down there street from there.  Quite plausible.

There are many familiar faces in this flick. Dan Lauria (The Wonder Years) plays a crooked detective, Stephen Macht (The Monster Squad, Graveyard Shift) and Brad Greenquist (Pet Sematary) are crooked agents, Jeff Wincott (The Invasion, Prom Night) is a criminal, Don Harvey (Die Hard, Taken 3) is a henchman, and James Lew (Traffic, Rush Hour 2) is “the Asian bad guy.”

Bad movies put a lot of stock in “the Asian bad guy.” Just look at Kickboxer, Bloodsport and The Best of the Best—all Asian bad guys!  The first bad guy who can fight in this movie is an Asian henchman–and being Asian, naturally, he had to be a martial artist.  So when James Lew shows up and out kung fu-s the other Asian, we know he’s not the Asian we want to cross.  Rothrock’s fight with Lew is the only remotely redeeming scene in the entire movie featuring a few decent acrobatic stunts.  The only problem is that the director had no idea how to shoot scenes with people who actually knew how to fight.  Way too close-up and way too many cuts.  Shame.  A total waste of talent.

Watch this for a good laugh with a buzz but do not, I repeat DO NOT watch this expecting to see a fun Cynthia Rothrock martial arts movie. For of all the horrible things this movie is, “that” it is not.

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Gods of Egypt is a weird movie directed by the talented director Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City). It is a bright blob of CGI that features stiff performances, white Egyptians and Gerard Butler yelling a lot. It is a mishmash of Egyptian history, glossy colors and a few really cool ideas. It represents the worst of big budget film making because it homogenizes cool ideas and moves so quickly you don’t care about anything.  There are chases scenes, giant snakes and plunging neck-lines but it becomes boring. The $140 million film bombed at the box-office and feels like it was filmed in 2001, forgotten about, then dumped into the theaters this year.

I wonder if the distressed looks are from watching the dailies?

Gods of Egypt tells the story of the Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) attempting to get revenge on his uncle Set (Gerard Butler). Why does he want revenge? Well, on the day he was to become king, Set killed his parents, stole his girlfriend and ripped out his eyes. Set takes over world, and it becomes a gross place where nobody has money to go into the afterlife (Set is a jerk). However, a resourceful and underwritten thief named Bek (Brenton Thwaites) steals back Horus’s eyes and they go a mission to save the thieve’s girlfriend Zaya (Courtney Eaton) and kill Set. What follows is a bonkers movie that plays like The Immortals met Wrath of the Titans then teamed up with Prince of Persia and spawned something silly. It is stuck in a boring middle ground between blockbuster and Monty Python sketch. I kept waiting for this to happen.

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I’ve been a fan of director Alex Proyas for 22 years now. He stormed out of the gate with The Crow, then directed the beautiful Dark City. From there his talents were wasted in I, Robot, Knowing and now Gods of Egypt. His films are always best when they feature grimy settings and R-rated violence.  His style doesn’t blend well with CGI because he needs something practical to ground the science fiction in. In The Crow and Dark City he created iconic characters and moments that thrived in the bleak and layered settings. His CGI PG-13 films are basically all smash, crash and more smash. The chase scenes follow a strict structure of people running from CGI creations while the CGI creations destroy CGI structures. There is no creativity to the action and I found myself missing the Brendan Fraser classic (yeah, I said it) The Mummy.

Gods of Egypt is a wasted world building opportunity. It feels like they put it together in a couple months and forgot about making it good. You can’t will a franchise into existence, and I hate that it might prevent future original properties from being released.

MY CALL:  This is on the better side of the Cynthia Rothrock movie spectrum.  It’s highly stupid, but highly entertaining if you are in a “bad movie” mood.  MOVIES LIKE China O’Brien:  Well, don’t watch Outside the Law (2002) or Night Vision (1997) unless you’re looking for proper Bad Movie Tuesday material.  They are awful!  You might also try the Brazilian remake of China O’Brien called Only the Strong (1993) or the “old white guy” re-imagining Walker, Texas Ranger (1993-2001).  Clearly Rothrock has left her mark in cinema history!

Written and directed by the legendary Robert Clouse (Enter the Dragon, Game of Death, Gymkata), this is far better than the likes of Outside the Law (2002) or Night Vision (1997) but falls far short of a Bruce Lee movie.  Clouse has handled fine martial artists on screen before and understands how to stage tandem techniques (6-12 techniques per cut) to provide an enjoyable action movie experience for martial arts fans and general (bad movie) action fans alike.  But even though Rothrock is capable of some impressive stunts please make no mistake, this absolutely is a Bad Movie Tuesday quality movie! LOL.

After a grown-ass man in a mid-drift belly t-shirt doubts the practical utility of martial arts in front of his karate instructor (Cynthia Rothrock; Night Vision, Outside the Law, Undefeatable) and her class, he challenges China to a back alley fight with five guys.  “You and five guys,” he says.  Is that 5 on 5, her plus 5 against him plus 5… or 5 on her?  Because this sounds vaguely like an invitation to a gang rape.  Well, we never find out what it was meant to be because China (big city police officer by day and martial arts instructor by night) gets ambushed by a gang of random criminals in the alley that evening and, because of an otherwise justified shooting resulting in the death of a minor, China surrenders her badge.

To clear her head China returns to her little home town to stay with her father, the local sheriff.  She’s in town not 10 minutes before accidently offending all the Podunk townies with her nice clothes and big fancy words—clearly “she thinks she’s better than us.”  So a silly bar fight ensues with her in her nice clothes, a man “attacks” her by grabbing her butt, and she kicks down a group of guys like dominoes like something out of a cartoon.  As far as martial arts movies go, this is really campy and the setting feels a bit like Walker, Texas Ranger (1993-2001) meets Walking Tall (1973, 2004) with a dash of Roadhouse (1989).

Now Rothrock is no Jackie Chan.  But she earns her title as the Queen of Martial Arts by executing stunts rarely seen performed by white actors and outside of Hong Kong cinema.  She nails aerial cartwheels from higher ground and does all manner of physics defiant strength maneuvers all the while narrating the names and utility of the techniques like a Shaolin master teaching her pupil in some 1970s Kung Fu Theater flick—which she thankfully stops doing after the opening fight scene.  It’s so corny, but it’s surely enjoyable as long as you weren’t expecting anything serious.  Compared to this, Van Damme is 100% straight-faced serious.  Oh, and evidently Rothrock is a T-800 series Terminator because she never appears to be phased by having someone twice her size punch her in the face!

What’s really “interesting” about the action choreography is that that “characters” are just as good at things as the “actors” are. For example, Rothrock has kicked someone like 10,000 times—so when she kicks someone the kick looks good.  But an actor that hasn’t “been kicked” too often looks like a stuntman school dropout in this movie and, worse yet, an actor who has never strangled someone will offer up the least inspired strangling scene on record.  You basically sit there wishing the strangling assassin would die from his own poor technique.

Nobody panic. It’s just a dead hooker.

This movie also has no sense of pacing. We go from a contemporary Kung Fu theater flick with lots of technical action, to a long run of boring exposition and painful acting, and then find our point of conflict when China’s dad dies in an exploding car assassination and we see her (and her boobs) run and jump in slow motion.  Then the movie shifts to nothing but fights—lots of them.  China didn’t know how long she’d be in town, but now we know she’ll stay until she avenges her father and takes down the local crime lord.

Within days of leaving her big city job China is running for sheriff to replaced her murdered father so she can take on a syndicate of shockingly poorly organized small town criminals.

So what makes this a bad movie?  Here are a few clues:

1. The town is protected by a “seasoned career sheriff” who seems to know nothing about the law. And he’s subsequently replaced by his daughter who constantly breaks the law to enforce it.
2. Slow motion boob running for the sake of slow motion boob running.
3. The sound effect of bowling pins when kicking down five guys at once.
4. Car explosions. Multiple car explosions.  80s and 90s movies loved bad guys who killed people with car bombs.  I’m not sure why.
5. A completely unexplained Australian accent in BFE, Utah. This character Matt (Richard Norton) grew up with China, so he presumably lived in the town since the late 1950s.
6. Crime “lords” that bother with tiny towns. Of course, these criminals seem to really suck at crime.
7. Criminals being deputized the day after being arrested for attempted murder and posting bail (imaged below). And to make up for it, China deputizes a bunch of Matt’s high school gym class students who run around town punching bad guys with deputy badges pinned to their tank tops!
   
8. No explanations whatsoever, for ANYTHING! (see items 1-7…and 9-11)
9. Using the ass-grab technique as a viable bar fight attack. The fight already started and everyone there wants to knock China out.  So, wild haymaker to the face or…perhaps…ass grab?  Good choice.  Ass grab.
10. A one-handed Native American ninja (Dakota) who inexplicably couldn’t fight until he lost his hand—and, speaking of which, I didn’t know that stepping on someone’s hand resulted in amputation! How and where did this guy learn to fight?  And why couldn’t he fight at all before?
11. This is a big one. China’s name “China” is never explained—but I figure it’s to make us associate Rothrock’s character with Asian martial arts.  But she (Rothrock and her character) was born in the late 50s and grew up in a small, ill-educated town that probably lost a lot of men to American wars, and China and America went to war in the early 1950s.  It was kind of a big deal!  So wouldn’t her dad think better of naming her after a rather hated country at the time?

Rothrock actually shares the fighting screen spotlight almost equally with her two martial artist co-stars Richard Norton (Mad Max: Fury Road, Roadhouse 2: Last Call) and Keith Cooke (Mortal Kombat).  The spin kicks are abundant but never awesome, the plot points are idiotic, and there’s nothing wowing to be found here.  You’ll be consistently entertained but you won’t get piss drunk and try to emulate any of it with your friends…like I did after watching Van Damme movies in the 90s.

What is he even doing here!?!?!?!
Setting his stump from stun to kill?

This movie is not good, but it can be really entertaining if you walk into it with the right Bad Movie Tuesday frame of mind.  Keep in mind, nothing is going to make sense in this movie.  So if you can decide ahead of time that something like this would be funny, then you’ll come out of this a winner!  I did!  And I actually expected a totally serious R-rated action movie like the old Jeff Speakman (The Perfect Weapon, Street Knight) and Steven Seagal (Hard to Kill, Under Siege) days.

MY CALL:  Also senselessly retitled as The Blood of Heroes, this post-apocalyptic Mad Max sports movie makes for an excellent Bad Movie Tuesday with gentle echoes of Gladiator (2000), Rollerball (1975) and even The Matrix (1999).  MOVIES LIKE Salute of the Jugger:  Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), but even more so Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) and Rollerball (1975, 2002).

Misinformative posters…there are no red fingernails (left) and I don’t know what’s going on (right).

The 20^th century has come and gone, its technology and more serene times long forgotten, and in its place is The Game…which is played with… a dog skull…!?!?!?!  Did I just read that opening caption right?

Cut to a young boy running and screaming a “Juggers” version of Paul Revere’s “the redcoats are coming” and a Tomboyish Kidda (Joan Chen; Wedlock, The Last Emperor) working in a sandy crop field of this Mad Max-esque post-Apocalyptic wasteland.  And in march the Juggers, a rugged group mixing the aspects of the Sand People and gladiators—and speaking of gladiators, Mbulu (Delroy Lindo; Gone in 60 Seconds, Point Break) might just have been the inspiration for Gladiator’s (2000) Juba (played by Djimon Hounsou). Not just that, but Hauer does the Maximus Gladiator pre-battle sand-hand ritual.  But let’s just pause and appreciate this weirdly eclectic cast in this cult classic, Australian B-movie.  [Are you pausing to reflect…?]

These Juggers are led by Sallow (Rutger Hauer; True Blood, Bleeders) and they stop at a clearing to remove some, yes, “traditionally prepared” dog skulls from a sack before facing their competition.  The scar-faced Big Climber (Anna Katarina; Angels and Demons, Star Trek) and Young Gar (Vincent D’Onofrio; The Salton Sea, Daredevil) arm themselves with wicker shin guards, chain whips, flails and leathers as other scarred warriors don stylish partial face masks. We know a brutal battle this way comes.

The Game resembles a combination of rugby, la Crosse, Rollerball (1975, 2002) and American Gladiators.  Trying to rush a bloody animal skull across a sandy wasteland while being lethally assaulted, this game makes no more sense to me than a barbaric Quidditch match!  I found the action to be entertaining, but not even a little bit “good” technically speaking.

Writer/director David Webb Peoples (writer for Blade Runner, Ladyhawke) has certainly done better.  This film basically opens with a traveling team that plays an away game, loses a player to an injury, then recruits a rookie and trains her with rushing drills.  After 30 min, they’re basically on to their second away game and move on to challenge a pro team from “the League.”  That’s right, this is essentially a minor league misfits sports movie.

So what makes this a bad movie?  Here are a few clues:

1. I’m not really sure how to measure the success of this film. It had a budget of $10 million Australian dollars in 1988, then grossed almost $900K USD in America and under $200K AUD.  Can that be right?
2. Rutger Hauer is in it—he’s made a lot of bad movies in his time.
3. Max Fairchild (Mad Max, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, The Howling III), Richard Norton (China O’Brien, Mad Max: Fury Road) and Hugh Keays-Byrne (Mad Max, Mad Max: Fury Road) make this into a Mad Max reunion.
4. They play a full contact, lethal sport with a dog skull for a ball and keep game time by counting thrown stones. There were no hourglasses in the year 2020???
5. The action really isn’t great. Perhaps up to snuff for the late 80s, but still. You spend a lot of time wondering what these Jugger positions are really meant to accomplish on the field.

Misinformative posters…Joan Chen does NOT dress like a dominatrix (left) and this is not a Vietnam War movie (right).

The movie climaxes when Sallow’s team ventures into an underground city (like a rundown Zion) to play the super tough League team.  But do they stand a chance?  [Shiver]  As if we all don’t already know.

It’s no Hogwart’s or Zion, but the world-building was actually pretty cool; using nuts and bolts as currency, lower castes living above land, this established sports system that’s akin to Rome’s gladiatorial arena to engage the poor and entertain the upper castes, the lawless game that has pre-set/standardized equipment that you (perhaps) make yourself, the completely unexplained dog skull… this world feels credibly lived in despite its somewhat ridiculous premise.

Misinformative posters…this is not a movie about a boyish Asian lady and a leper (left) and, AGAIN, this is not a Vietnam War movie (right).

This movie is really only semi-bad for its time, but pretty bad when viewed today.  Think Robot Jox (1989)… awesome, right? Awesome yet awful…yet not really awful…but maybe really pretty awful.  LOL.  Yeah, it’s like that.  I enjoyed it.

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MY CALL:  If you’re a fan of atrociously bad 80s fantasy B-movies loaded with the worst fight scenes, depictions magic, occasional sexploitation, and creature effects ever—see it.  If you have to ask, this probably isn’t for you.  MOVIES LIKE Thor the Conqueror:  Do you like this 80s fantasy badness?  How about Flash Gordon (1980), Sorceress (1982), Kull the Conqueror (1997), Krull (1983), Conquest (1983), Deathstalker (1983), The Devil’s Sword (1984), The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984) and Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans (1987).  All of these movies are better than Barbarian Queen (1985) in every possible way except for amply breast-filled minutes of screen time. Like all the fantasy but don’t care for all the “bad”?  Then perhaps aim for Legend (1985), Beastmaster (1982), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Conan the Destroyer (1984) or Willow (1988) on for size.

Bad movie posters. There is no bear or elephant in this movie, he doesn’t have short blond hair, she isn’t blond nor does she ever wear a fur bikini.  ALL LIES! LOL

I’m not gonna’ lie.  I bought this on an intoxicated Amazon shopping spree several years ago and have been dreading the day that I finally decide to watch it.  Well, today is that day!  Director Tonino Ricci (Cave of the Sharks, Night of the Sharks) and writer Tino Carpi (Tentacle, Warriors of the Wasteland), who have probably never made anything good between both their careeres, have provided our ultra-classy viewing enjoyment for the evening.

Don’t pretend you don’t see the resemblance.

We start by meeting a barbarian who looks like a caveman Weird Al Yankovic, his wizard companion and his pregnant wife.  After she scurries off into the bushes to give birth they are ambushed and face some of the silliest sword fighting ever.  For real, LARPers are more lethal with foam weapons than these idiotic berserkers.  After the barbarian father is killed by some kind of evil bad guy leader with an arrow through the neck, the wizard casts some spell to magically teleport himself and newborn baby Thor to safety.  Evidently he couldn’t be troubled to try to save the mother or anyone else with his sorcery.  He later demonstrates some magical abilities that could have come in handy in saving Thor’s parents!

Thor (Bruno Minniti; A Man Called Rage, The Porno Killers) is raised by the wizard, who apparently taught him swordsmanship—because wizards are known for that skill set—and not magic.  Go figure.

After a couple destitute action sequences his wizard surrogate dad pulls an Obi-Wan and turns permanently into an owl (for really no reason at all) to oversee Thor attaining his destiny, which apparently involves reclaiming his murdered father’s sword.  I’d again like to point out the power of this wizard and how he could have saved Thor’s family or simply accomplished Thor’s stupid quest on his own with ease.  He was casting spells from the afterlife, so he could have teleported Thor to the sword, and that would be it.  Boom: movie.

On his generally vague journey Thor is charged with fighting some women, escaping a tribe of primitive natives, meeting his hardly-clothed captive-turned-girlfriend Ina (Maria Romano; Violence in a Woman’s Prison, Women’s Prison Massacre), defeating his father’s murderer Gnut (Raf Baldassarre; The Killer Wore Gloves), and presumably engaging is forcefully non-consensual intercourse with two women—at the wizard’s encouragement to completely disregard the women’s rights or choice in the matter!  But hey, there’s consensual sex, too.

For real, her boob is ready to pull a Tara Reid and flop out at any moment throughout the movie.

So what makes this a bad movie?  Here are a few clues:

1. Thor’s first scenes have him speaking like Tarzan. Then later he talks normally.  Then back to “Me, Thor. You bad guy.”  No clue why.
2. His wizard adopted-father basically tells him to “have his way” with a scantily clad woman. “Go on and rape her, son.”  .. classy.
3. There’s violence against women. Thor straight up breaks a warrior woman’s neck while choking her out, then knocks a woman down and fondles her.  I’m so embarrassed to have seen this movie! SMH
4. Your drunk, overweight, Dungeons and Dragons-playing friends who have never been in a fight could stage better fight scenes than I witnessed in this POS movie.
5. A sword turns into a snake…then nothing happens! Apparently, a shot of a snake doing nothing was considered a big deal to the filmmakers.  I just scratched my head, chugged a beer, and tried to get on with my life.
6. Later Thor milks snake venom from a clearly non-venomous snake.
7. This is basically a mild exploitation movie.  And, like in Sorceress (1982), our protagonist has never seen the opposite sex.  Yet when exposed, he knows EXACTLY what to do with bare boobs!
8. Scan through this review and read the parenthetically annotated movies the cast, writer and director have done. Pure drudgery!
9. Needlessly scantily clad women. I’m not complaining, though.
10. The wizard “likes to watch” and boy is it creepy.
11. Thor is given the “first ever” horse in a world that has never witnessed mounted combat. So he rides it “to” the fight, then dismounts. Idiot!

This movie is terrible in so many ways.  But like many bad movies, if you go in knowing what you’re in for, it might be exactly what you wanted.  So sit back, have a few beers, and join a friend in watching one of the worst fantasy flicks of the 80s.

MY CALL:  Looking for tandem jump spin kicks, perpetual muscle flexing, Belgian butt shots and a secret death match martial arts tournament?  Well, look no further!  MOVIES LIKE Bloodsport:  Other Van Damme movies, of course!  But maybe this movie isn’t bad enough for you and you want something a bit more “campy bad.” If that’s the case, try China O’Brien (1990), Outside the Law (2002), Night Vision (1997) or Only the Strong (1993).

So you’re probably wondering “John, this is Van Damme at his best, there are real stars in the cast, he faces an iconic bad guy and the score is awesome!  How could this be a bad movie?”

Fair question.  Well, when it came out I’d say it was epic and into the 90s it was awesome…and it’s still awesome to maybe you, definitely me, and most people who saw it back in the 80s or early 90s.  But, come on.  By today’s standards this is not awesome; not to most 18-year-olds.  This is a once great movie that is sort of now bad.

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This movie opens with a serene sort of martial arts movie perfection. Most 80s martial arts movies open with synth scoring and annoying clichés.  Quite to the contrary we are practically bewitched by the completely exotic East Asian scoring (by Paul Hertzog; Kickboxer) as we enjoy scenes from busy Chinese streets and preparations being made for the legendary underground tournament.

“But hold on, this sounds far too legit.  Didn’t you say this was a Bad Movie Tuesday?”  Well, yeah it is.  You see, mixed in with these insightful shots are two street thug-looking dudes in denim vests (a la Roadhouse) who are meant to protect the world’s most secret martial arts tournament from discovery with their puny biceps and no weapons to be found.

The answer is YES…
He IS ALWAYS flexing.

But I really need to return to the score.  The music is mystical, enchanting even, as we watch martial artists around the world breaking giant ice blocks, sparring and training for the chance to prove they’re the best.

When we meet Captain Frank Dux (Jean-Claude Van Damme; Kickboxer, Double Impact, Time Cop) he’s spin-kicking a speed bag in a unitard, snug around the butt and sweaty biceps glistening for the ladies.  By the way, it seems that everyone and their mother knows who got invited to the “secret” Kumite and that it’s in Hong Kong.  This goes doubly for Dux’s commanding officer, who he slips with the old “I’ll be in office right after I take a shower” gag.  Psych!

Dux is quite stylish—a common trend in JCVD characters, in fact—showing up to his Shidoshi’s (Roy Chiao; Enter the Dragon, Game of Death, The Protector) home in the kind of leather jacket you’d see a wealthy pornographer or 80s Glam Rock band member wearing.  While he waits to pay homage to his master, he reflects…aaaaaand fade to flashback!

This movie might just feature the coolest training montage ever!  It features blindfolded fighting, meditation, music that is simply magical, five tandem ridgehand chops to the stomach, concentration exercises, bare-handed fishing, extreme flexibility, some serious shinai work, the hands-down toughest white belt I’ve ever seen, the most brutal stretching exercise, and blindfolded tea parties.  Beat that, Rocky!

Let’s touch on our supporting cast. Ray Jackson (Donald Gibb; Transylvania 6-5000) is his lovably ignorant American lug and sidekick, reporter Janice (Leah Ayres; The Burning) is the sexy love interest with a nose for a story and trying to sneak her way into the Kumite, the young and pushy Agent Rawlins (Forest Whitaker; Species, Battlefield Earth) and the older calmer Agent Helmer (Norman Burton; American Ninja 5, Deep Space) are hot on Frank’s trail, and then there’s Frank and Ray’s guide Lin (Ken Siu) who’s good for more than a few laughs and some blatant exposition.

I guess it does make a difference if Bruce Springsteen is a Shidoshi because upon arrival to the Kumite, Frank’s round-eyed legitimacy is challenged and to prove himself he must perform the Dim Mak (death touch).  This is among the most famous moments of this movie.  Of course they say “bottom one” when picking bricks from the stack—which was conveniently already set up.  I wonder who else had to do the Dim Mak. And I wonder if Jackson assumed the old master was ordering Frank to get him a fast food value meal.

But would the top one really be so easy?  Think about it.  It’s a stack of five bricks.  To break the top one without affecting the bricks below it would be brutally difficult as well.  Either way, this is amaze-balls-tactic!  But for some reason, Chong Li (Bolo Yeung; Enter the Dragon, Double Impact) is among the audience and he looks like he could care less or maybe simply has indigestion from his large vanilla shake, Double Bacon Dee Mac and fries—he’s the only guy wearing a sweatshirt as if he just returned from a Shoney’s buffet and felt embarrassed about being bloated the day before the Kumite.  Meanwhile, wearing a male stripper tank top and slacks, Dux slams the stack for the absolute best exploding brick scene in movie history.  You should see his face: TOTAL INTENSITY!  It’s like Dux simultaneously explosively sharted and unexpectedly saw boobs for the first time—he actually makes that face several times.  And yet Chong Li is so not impressed, taunting “Very good. But brick not hit back.”  What a doofus!

That face you make when you reeeeeally had to poop.

Well, it’s the day of the Kumite and Frank’s warming up in the hotel.  “That hurts me just lookin’ at it,” says Jackson with a morning beer in his hand. Of course we come across Frank’s two-chair straddling mediation session (not unlike his recent Volvo truck commercial) which made Jackson beg: “You know you better stop doin’ that stuff. You may wanna’ have kids one of these days.”

About now I’d like to pause and assess how we know this is a bad movie:

1. How is this ancient-looking marble-walled and gold-calligraphied temple somehow kept a secret when it’s basically in the basement of a poor tenement building in Hong Kong?
   
2. Donald Gibb is in this. You know?  The big Viking from the Capitol One commercials and the big jock from Revenge of the Nerds (1984).
   
3. The African martial artist prances about like a monkey and karate chops coconuts. Don’t mess with that guy.
4. Was the guy fighting on the beach in maybe Hawaii (I suppose?) just street fighting for cash? His opponent was not impressive.  Some of these fighters aren’t as convincing as the scintillating background music. The smallest Sumo wrestler ever throws a sack and knocks over two little guys—soooooo we’re establishing that his big and strong? FML.
5. Shidoshi Tanaka’s 12-year-old son is his home security system and instead of sounding an alarm he expedites kicks to the stomach.
6. The flashbacks to Frank’s childhood feature the gawkiest actor and the worst lines ever. Based on meeting young Frank, you’d assume he’d never have sex in his life…EVER!
7. If the tournament is held in Hong Kong, an epicenter of Chinese martial arts, why does the Kumite winner receive a Katana, the quintessential Japanese weapon?
8. How did Shingo Tanaka die??? Frank basically claims Shingo’s ticket to the Kumite and we get no explanation!
9. If you pay close attention, you’ll realize that Frank was a white belt for years. But then, presto! He’s a black belt just in time for the Kumite.
10. So is the Kumite a secret or not. Janice calls it a secret and two fighters won’t say a word. Jackson meets a stranger (i.e., Frank Dux) at an arcade game and mentions the Kumite casually in passing like “come see me fight in the Kumite.” The investigators are trying to find the secret location, yet everyone seems to know everyone who’s invited.
    
    
11. The fights feature completely gratuitous tactical rolls (by JCVD), needlessly hurling people out of the ring, the Sumo wrestler gets punched in the nuts by TWO different opponents, the Sumo wrestler also performs TWO back-breaks and no one bats an eye at it (foreshadowing Kickboxer???), and silly grandstanding.
12. The entirety of Bolo Yeung’s lines are: “Very good, but brick not hit back…You are next…You break my record, now I break you like I break your friend…Matte.”
    
13. Dux finishes off Chong Li with four tandem jump skin kicks to the head, which I’m pretty sure would be fatal.
    

The first couple fights are laughably weak.  But then, as if it was the first day in the prison yard, Chong Li straight up kills a clearly inferior opponent for all to see, as if he was just making a point.

For the most part, this is not a movie for technical fight choreography snobs who live for the likes of Tony Jaa (Ong Bak), Scott Adkins (Universal Solder: Day of Reckoning), Michael Jai White (Undisputed 2-3) or Iko Uwais (The Raid: Redemption).  The fights are generally unimpressive by today’s standards, although quite decent outside of Hong Kong cinema in the 80s.  Although, a couple of fights (e.g., the one between two obvious martial artists who had almost no dialogue) were of higher caliber.  And, of course, Van Damme dances about with the sleekest and smoothest choreography in the movie—whereas Yeung enjoys the more brutally abrupt fights.  The style of the music trades between them accordingly.  Already in his 40s when he made this movie, Bolo Yeung brings his “old man strong” game as he busts his opponent’s knee in one of the worst leg breaks.

Now let’s lighten things up…

How about some highlights…?  I just love the playful and quite polite chase scene through the streets of Hong Kong, prancing in the streets and running across chains of small boats to Steal the Night; there’s an obligatory Van Damme butt shot for the ladies after the least action hero-iest “love scene” ever; and Van Damme’s fight against the Sumo wrestler is unforgettable.

This is the movie that established the Van Damme staples: a Belgian butt shot (with the reporter), splits during a fight (vs Sumo), tandem jump spin kicks (vs Chong Li), and a sappy closing scene with the subject of his motivation (with Jackson).

This is one of Van Damme’s best and most rewatchable movies.  What’s odd is that this was the only movie in which Van Damme was totally dominating his final bad guy—until, of course, Chong Li cheated and blinded him.  Typically, Van Damme gets his ass handed to him then suddenly finds mid-fight motivation to save the day like Hulk Hogan back in the early WrestleManias.

In either case, this movie is a spectacle that every man over 30 should own and love.  Buy it, watch it, then join our nostalgia by listening to our Van Damme podcast episode!

MY CALL:  Much hokier than Bloodsport (1988), Kickboxer (1989) or Lionheart (1990), but with “some” better fighting, stunts and martial artists.  MOVIES LIKE The Quest:  Other Van Damme movies, of course!  Especially Bloodsport (1988) and Lionheart (1990), which both feature hush-hush Fight Clubs that can’t keep a secret.  But maybe this movie isn’t bad enough for you and you want something a bit more “campy bad.” If that’s the case, try China O’Brien (1990), Outside the Law (2002), Night Vision (1997) or Only the Strong (1993) for your Bad Movie Tuesday.

Okay, so this was actually written by the real life Frank Dux (the guy whose highly doubted story Bloodsport is based)—in that his “story” was the basis for it—and Jean-Claude Van Damme (Kickboxer, Double Impact, The Expendables 2, Time Cop, Bloodsport).  Somehow I don’t expect much from a movie written by a guy who (by the opinion of many) fabricated a story about winning an invitational secret Kumite tournament, and the Muscles from Brussels who played this potential Kumite tall tale teller.  Essentially, this is a fictionalized retelling of what may have originally been fiction in the first place and it’s directed by Van Damme himself.

In case this Dux-slamming seems mean and unfounded, please understand that since the 1988 movie’s release his story has always been considered a highly probably lie.  Here’s an article (CLICK HERE) from 2015, and another, and another, and another way back from 1988, pointing out the inconsistencies and dubious claims.  Van Damme even doubted its validity while filming Bloodsport.

Well now that you know who wrote it, it should come as no surprise that this opens much as Bloodsport (1988) did, but with neither of the magic nor style, with preparations for the big secret tournament. They form melted gold into a dragon statue and send scrolled invitations in person to their recipient fighters, including interrupting a Sumo wrestler’s bath and a Nazi’s fencing lesson.  He’s not really a Nazi, but for some reason they make him seem despicably mean.

Then we meet street urchin Chris Dubois (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who combines Oliver Twist’s Fagan and Robin Hood as he cares for a group of homeless orphan pickpockets.  Dubois is an acrobatic thief with some pretty decent fighting skills, but he is forced to flee and leave the kids when the consequences of his criminal actions catch up to him.  Of course, he promises the children he’ll be back.

During his escape he sneaks on to a ship and is taken prisoner.  He is rescued by Lord Edgar Dobbs (Roger Moore; A View to a Kill, Octopussy) and his assistant Harry (Jack McGee; Drive Angry), and subsequently ditched halfway around the world in on Muay Thai Island.

So eventually a caption graces the bottom of the screen: “6 months later.”  Not sure how long it takes a small vessel to sail from northeastern America to Thailand or how long he was on Muay Thai Island before his “owner” decided to train him, but in combination it must’ve been 3-4 weeks.  Let’s call it a month—plus “6 months later” is about 7 months from the time the first Ghang-gheng (that’s our Kumite equivalent in this movie) invitations were sent out.  That’s a long time in advance to send out an RSVP.

Revisiting Thailand, Lord Dobbs has made the acquaintance of an attractive young journalist Carrie (Janet Gunn; Carnosaur 3, Silk Stalkings) who is looking for a great story…just like Bloodsport…and they bump into Dubois, who has climbed the ranks and become a feared Muay Thai fighter.  In order to repay Dubois for wronging him, Dobbs is to help him gain the “Golden Dragon” from the tournament in the Lost City where the greatest fighters of the world compete in secret.  And again, just like in Bloodsport, there’s a secret competition that folks know about who weren’t invited!  In this case, it’s Dubois who wasn’t invited to the party. So how did he know?  When his trainer on Muay Thai Island was invited did he have a party to celebrate and announce it to everyone?  Did he tape the invitation on his Thai fighting office communal refrigerator as a reminder?  Does the whole island know?  Or are only their enslaved American fighters afforded such privileged secrecy?

Well now Dobbs, Harry, Carrie and Dubois want to go to the Lost City…but how will they find it?  It is a secret, right?  No problem, after a single phone call Carrie knows that the invited World Champion boxer from America Maxie Devine (James Remar; Tale from the Darkside) is about to arrive right where they are in Thailand en route to the Lost City.  So evidently the first reporter she spoke to in America asking about the secret tournament knew not only that the tournament was happening, but who was invited and that he was on his way and his travel itinerary!  This takes place in 1920.  Even with the internet and phone taps this would be impressive!

So now the plan is for Dobbs, Harry, Carrie and Dubois to pose as Maxie’s hosting entourage to escort him to the Lost City.

Remember the “entering the tournament hall” scene in Bloodsport when everyone doubted the American fighter (now Maxie Devine), Dux did the Dim Mak (now the Mongolian breaking the table) and Chong Li had some words (now the Mongolian’s sneers)?  Yeah, so that all gets replayed here.

So we’re all in the Lost City, whose “secret location” was most definitely aided by the huge German Zepplin flying in and landing on location, and it looks a lot like the Kickboxer (1989) arena with the Bloodsport officials.  This is where we get to meet everyone and Maxie outs Dubois as an imposter, to which the elder officials state that unless he “proves himself a worthy opponent” and wins the first round there will be some pretty serious consequences.  But wait, does this mean that everyone who loses in the first round—half the fighters!!!—is now categorized as “unworthy?”  Seems a bit harsh.  And moreover, now that we know Dubois and his gang are imposters, is no one concerned about Dobbs, Harry or Carrie (the fkn undercover reporter!!!)?  Isn’t this whole thing supposed to be a secret?  I’m beginning to think this is the first year of this tournament!

You’ll notice a lot of these opponents have been in other Van Damme movies.  It seems Van Damme keeps a stable of friends like Adam Sandler, doesn’t he?  There’s the feared Mongolian Khan (Abdel Qissi; Lionheart, The Order), who seems way bigger than 6’2” the way they present him; Phang (Jen Sung; Under Siege 2) the Siamese fighter; another boringly unimpressive Sumo wrestler (Kitao Koji; Wrestlemania VII); the mean Nazi (Habby Heske; Mr. Nice Guy); the French fighter (Takis Triggelis; Legionnaire, Savate); the ripped Turkish guy who only landed one cheap hit and went down in one stupid hit; the sensational Brazilian capoeirista (César Carneiro; Only the Strong); the big Greek guy (Stefanos Miltsakakis; Cyborg, Lionheart, Maximum Risk); the stylish Spanish fighter (Peter Malota; Double Impact, Nowhere to Run, The Order) who looks a little like Antonio Banderas; the African Zulu-esque warrior (Winston Ellis; Operation Condor); that poor Okinawan (Ong Soo Han; Kickboxer, Street Fighter); the lame Russian (Brick Bronsky; Troma movies); the Scotsman (Mike Lambert; Knock Off) who gets it in the balls; and the Chinese five-animal kung fu master (Peter Wong; Bulletproof Monk) who was AMAZING!

About now I’d like to pause and assess how we know this is a bad movie:

1. Van Damme in old man make-up AND in mime make-up. Need I say more?

2. There’s no chase scene, no training splits, no dressing like a male escort, no Belgian butt shot, no splits during a fight, no sex scene, no tandem jump spin kicks…where’s the Van Damme-iness we all came to love? At least his sweaty biceps glistened. But why did Van Damme sub in the Turk for the standard butt shot for the ladies? #BareButtFail
   
   

3. The old “Van Damme slip” escape scene. He does using the shower in Bloodsport (1988) and now he uses a sack of grain with his jacket wrapped around it.  This is some Bugs Bunny cartoon-level work.

4. He is caught as a stowaway on a ship and is forced into servitude…just like in Lionheart (1990). How many of his old movies will he borrow from?

5. After people from around the world visit the Lost City, is it still lost? I mean, these people suck at keeping secrets about secret martial arts tournaments.  So it’s fair to say that once they get back, the world will know.  And if the competition is always held in the Lost City, are we to assume that this was the first batch of competitors who can’t keep a secret?  After all, the invitation came with a map as if no one could ask how to get there.

6. How heavy is the Golden Dragon…well over 1000 pounds, right? Gold is HEAVY! Today gold is about $1400 per ounce!  Can these Lost City monks afford to be giving away so much gold? That’s in the neighborhood of $20 million!

7. They quote Bloodsport with the line: “What kind of a deal?”

8. They steal the Kickboxer (1989) bar fight scene when he sweeps the guy’s hands from leaning on the table.

9. Dubois’ fight against the Spanish fighter looked striking similar to Van Damme’s fight against the same exact actor in maybe the same shirt in Double Impact (1991)!

10. Maxie is basically a replacement for Bloodsport’s Ray Jackson (Donald Gibb; Transylvania 6-5000), only without the ‘Murica-level brain damage. Dobbs and Harry seem analogous to Agent Rawlins (Forest Whitaker; Species, Battlefield Earth) and Agent Helmer (Norman Burton; American Ninja 5, Deep Space), and Carrie is clearly Janice (Leah Ayres; The Burning).

11. This martial arts movie transforms our hero into a serious fighter, yet there is no training montage. In Bloodsport we get a JCVD montage and an opponent training montage! How is there no training montage? #TrainingMontageFail

12. Remember in Bloodsport how through its entirety Bolo Yeung’s lines were: “Very good, but brick not hit back…You are next…You break my record, now I break you like I break your friend…Matte.” Khan the Mongolian says even less! Not one line! And I’m not even kidding. He has zero lines!  Which makes me wonder if Qissi had any lines in Lionheart (1990) when he played Attila.

13. Dubois clutches Phang’s Muay Thai headdress like he did Ray Jackson’s Harley Davidson bandana after the Khan Tong-Po-back-breaks Phang like he did his brother in Kickboxer (1989). Then Dubois wears it, just like in Bloodsport.

14. They show some of the same fighting footage TWICE during Dubois’ fight against China! And then against Khan, they play the same punch combo footage FOUR TIMES!

15. What is it with Van Damme and back breaks? In Bloodsport the Sumo wrestler also performs TWO back-breaks, then Tong Po in Kickboxer, and now Khan does one here.

16. Dux finishes off Chong Li with four tandem jump skin kicks to the head, which is the only time replaying footage is okay. So where are the tandem jump spin kicks in The Quest?  Here we get only one in the final fight. ONE! #VanDammeFail
    
    

For the most part, this is not a movie for technical fight choreography snobs who love Tony Jaa (Ong Bak), Scott Adkins (Universal Solder: Day of Reckoning), Michael Jai White (Undisputed 2-3) or Iko Uwais (The Raid: Redemption).  The fights are generally unimpressive by today’s standards, although quite decent outside of Hong Kong cinema in the 80s.  Although, a couple of fights were of higher caliber.

The opening fights are terrible.  Spain v Russia and Japan v Okinawa are super short.  However, France v Brazil features some seriously cool stunts (especially for an American-made 90s martial arts movie) and China v Korea introduces us to the hands-down best martial artist in the movie, here showcasing snake-style kung fu.  Peter Wong’s opening flare techniques had me rewinding a few times just to figure out what exactly he did with that jump spin kick that included attacks to the front and the rear.  In Brazil v China, he does monkey-style kung fu—also a dazzling splendor of stunts, not to mention a playful monkey punch to a pair of Brazilian balls.

I don’t think Van Damme likes Scotsmen (e.g., Lionheart).  Here the Scottish guy loses to a punch to the balls right under the kilt from the Turk.  In fact, someone always seems to get hit in the nuts (e.g., that Brazilian, Sumo wrestler in Bloodsport).  This Turk, by the way, looks like ripped Hank Azaria from The Birdcage (1996) and he goes down in the best possible stupid way against the Sumo wrestler. I think Van Damme ha a soft spot for Sumo wrestlers because they seem to get the funniest fights in his movies.

Told you!

And oh my God, the Kickboxer (1989) influences!  Khan the Mongolian has Tong Po hair, Phang taught Dubois Muay Thai and then loses to a back break against Mongolian, mathematically speaking Khan = Chong Li + Tong Po, Phang’s master Khao resembles Mr. Xian who trained JCVD in Kickboxer, the guy who played Khan is the brother of the guy who played Tong Po (Michel Qissi; Kickboxer, Bloodsport), and BOTH brothers were in Lionheart (1990)!

I find this to be among the most recent Van Damme movies that I consider rewatchable.  It’s hokier than most, but still a lot of fun and nostalgically satisfying for me—of course, I saw this in theaters when I was 15, so I’m just the right age to love it.

If you enjoy this stuff, buy it, watch it, then join our nostalgia by listening to our Van Damme podcast episode!

MY CALL:  This sequel (to Jason Statham’s 2011 remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson classic) is extremely entertaining…and extremely campy.  Expect top tier stunts, but the dregs of writing.  MOVIES LIKE Mechanic: Resurrection:  I thought The Mechanic (2011) was FAR better (and, in fact, “good”), so I’d start there.  But, to be fair, Mark didn’t love it nearly as much as I did (Mark’s Review CLICK HERE).

This film answers the question on everyone’s mind.
EVERYONE: “Does Statham still look like this?”
THIS MOVIE: “Affirmative!”

We have to start with the writing!  The writing was soooo awful.  This is like 80s action movie awful when Stallone or Schwarzenegger would get a phone call, light a cigar and, the next thing we know, BOOM: they’re in Prague or somewhere else in Eastern Europe killing bad guys by the dozen standing out in the open, raining jingling automatic weapon ammunition to the ground in slow motion while not one of their 86 Communist assailants can aim a gun at a shirtless patriot whose glistening muscles practically make them a glowing target.

But you know what?  JASON STATHAM!  That’s why we’re here isn’t it?  The truth is… we just don’t care.  If you asked anyone waiting in line to buy their movie tickets if they thought the writing would be good, the dialogue convincing or the plot points sound—no one would nod “yes.”  They’d silently pause, look at their date with a smile and make that “pshhht” sound.

And Jason doesn’t care either. Look how happy he was in this interview as he laughed answering the question “Why do you think people like seeing you kick bad guys’ butts?”
He knew this wouldn’t be an Oscar contender.
No. This one’s for the bros!

As it turns out, founder of Movies, Films and Flix, film data analyst and Bad Movie Tuesday expert (Mark) wrote a Movienomics article that accurately predicted 18 months ago that this sequel would suck.  The data suggests his apparel—read to learn why.

However, with this alternate poster, the audience scores might increase.

The opening fight sequence features Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham; Spy, Homefront, Safe, Parker) executing some of the most perfect Matrix-like martial arts ever to cheese up the screen.  His character is every bit as perfect as Statham’s ego is tremendous–very much like his roles in The Transport series (2002, 2005, 2008), Furious 7 (2015) and The Expendables movies (2010, 2012, 2014).

Bishop always knows what to do, his kicks and bullets never miss, their bullets always miss, he always has exactly what he needs or can find it unreasonably fast, and everything works out to plan against astronomically improbably odds…and also with such “yadda yadda” writing that he just seems to teleport across the globe and have the entirety of the knowledge of the world uploaded into his brain for ease of assassination planning.  Bishop is basically the smartest man alive—but he grunts like Jason Statham.

Admittedly, I loved this scene.
He must’ve scienced the shit outta that.

Jessica Alba (Little Fockers, Stretch) has been cast as his completely unconvincing love interest.  Their “sex scene” is innocently clothes-on and uncharacteristically giggly for our gruff hero, she reprises her underwater naughty bikini butt-cam shots from Into the Blue (2005), and her initial placement in this movie is more forcefed than a dog being fed its heartworm pill.  Like the dog we resist and want nothing to do with it, but we accept that we have no choice and swallow.  It didn’t help when Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Sunshine), in her worst role ever, suggested that Arthur save her from some domestic abuse—while for the sake of his own survival he’s trying to lay low as an assassin who’s supposed to be dead and some bad people had just discovered he was alive…and he beat the crap out of them…hence the LOW PROFILE—and then insinuate that they were a “couple” almost immediately.

That’s right, we saw Michelle Yeoh calling us over with our favorite bacon-flavored treat, we saw that evil white medicinal pellet embedded in it, and we let her jam that nonsense down our throat!  Yuck, I feel dirty now.

I guess there are worse things I could have forced upon me.

The bad guy couldn’t be more Eurotrashy slick.  He’s always smug, he demands impossible tasks with unreasonably proximate deadlines, and never ever cares when a dozen of his men get shot in the face during a 2-minute action sequence that should be called “Bishop’s Lackluster Murder Revenge Marathon.”  Don’t these henchmen realize that he doesn’t care about their well-being…like…at all?  They should really listen to our Podcast Episode #43: Advice for Movie Henchman.  It baffles the mind how readily these goons jeopardize their lives against the most impossibly talented assassin their employer knows.

Oh, and keep an eye out for Tommy Lee Jones’ most annoying role ever.
I feel like they told the people in wardrobe:
“Just make him look like an asshole.”

Let’s be clear, folks.  I LOVED The Mechanic (2011).  LOVED IT!  Even though Statham did everything perfectly and was perhaps unreasonably knowledgeable and lucky then as well, we saw him patiently put in the effort and occasionally get frustrated.  The plot points made sense, the antagonist was credible and motivations were clear.  Even if you disagree, you’d have to give me that compared to part 1 these comparisons hold true.

This one features abhorrent writing and a nonsense premise while Statham prances around The Matrix knowing all and never missing. He wakes up and pisses excellence.  In fact, if his urine stream were to cross a bad guy’s neck, he’d surely be decapitated. Resurrection is an excellent fun bad action movie with great action sequences and I highly recommend you see it on the big screen for some bad-yet-awesome-action popcorn fun.  But as a “film” this script should be crumbled fodder for a hobo’s garbage fire.

Just keep expectations low and you’ll be dazzled. Expect the next Mission Impossible plot and you’ll be pissed.  Cheers!

MY CALL:  More of a fun “action” movie than a “martial arts” movie, this is LOADED with cheeky lines and “most” of the JCVD staples. But if you seek jump spin kicks, you should watch his earlier movies instead.  MOVIES LIKE Timecop:  Other Van Damme movies, of course! Especially Bloodsport (1988), Lionheart (1990) and The Quest (1996), which all feature hush-hush Fight Clubs that can’t keep a secret.  But maybe this movie isn’t bad enough for you and you want something a bit more “campy bad.” If that’s the case, try China O’Brien (1990), Outside the Law (2002), Night Vision (1997) or Only the Strong (1993) for your Bad Movie Tuesday.

Timecop boldly opens, challenging its viewers by posing the question: If a bunch of Confederate gold is highjacked by a time traveler during a wagon trail hold-up in 1800s Georgia, does anyone care?  Well, since all that did was remind me of the displaced silliness of laser guns in Cowboys and Aliens (2011), I’m gonna’ say no.  But honestly it was kind of a cool scene that, despite my joking, opened the movie with a bit of integrity.

But now we need to put on our serious faces and explain the “rules of changing the past” to set the urgency of the film.  “What if Saddam Hussein time travels to steal our atomic bomb technology to become a world power” and blah, blah blah, end of mankind, “ripples” in time are bad… And now there’s now been a ripple when some terrorists (present day) were found brokering an arms deal with confederate gold.

Is that a Stargate?

So now it’s time to create the Time Enforcement Commission (TEC) to essentially police time travel…with “time cops.”  From proposal of the TEC to appointing a chairperson takes about 6 minutes tops, making this the fastest act of legislation ever in the history of all things government—even the most insane dictators would think things over (like newly appointed commissions) during the course of a drink. I don’t think John Hancock signed his name in the time it took to convince a table of DC bigwigs that time travel technology was invented (without them knowing anything about it) and it “just happened last week!!!!”

They just nod like “sounds reasonable” after they are informed they “know” the gold is from the 1800s not just because of how it was marked (Property of the Confederacy or whatever), but because they carbon dated the aforementioned highjacked gold.  But wait… Can you carbon date pure gold????  Guess what, writers of Timecop?  You simply cannot carbon date things that don’t have carbon.  You don’t get to waive your hands in the air and say we know “because SCIENCE that’s why!”  As it goes, you can only “carbon” date things that have carbon in them. And since gold is made of…waiiiiit for it…GOLD (Au 79) and not CARBON isotope C-14, you can’t use carbon dating to estimate its age.

But let’s try to forget for a moment that our writers failed their 8^th grade Physical Science midterm and focus on the story.  Our hero is Max Walker (Jean-Claude Van Damme; Bloodsport, The Expendables 2, Universal Solder: Day of Reckoning), a cop with an incredibly American sounding name, an incredibly unexplained Belgian accent, an incredibly beautiful wife and an incredibly unbelievably huge house for his civil servant job in the greater DC metro area.

“Read it.”
“Wolverine…?”
“Between the lines.”
“I should get the Fuck outta here.”

We meet Max playing out some fantasy roleplay in the middle of a mall with his wife (Mia Sara; Legend, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) when he pulls an awesome little scene out of nowhere with a steady kick held in a rollerblading purse snatcher’s face.  Some ostentatiously crooked looking goons oversee the event and seem unimpressed with his obvious glute strength and balance.  It’s a pretty iconic scene—that and the washer/dryer jump split make for some exquisite trailer moments.

Thank you, by the way, to the writers and Mia Sara and Van Damme for acknowledging and playfully mocking Van Damme’s English.  “He read my mind…With your English he didn’t have much choice…Hey, I know all the good words.”

On that note, this movie is loaded with some great 90s action movie lines…

“Is this TEC work dangerous?”
“I don’t bake cookies for a living.”

But Van Damme’s movies are known for more than thick European accents being applied to American characters delivering cheeky lines.  He’s also known for his surprisingly tender love scenes that might just be presented as much for the ladies as the men (e.g., Double Impact, Bloodsport).  JCVD’s Kenny G-scored love scene comes complete with iconic Van Damme bare butt shot for the ladies, some Mia Sara nudity for the bros, and soft lighting for the production geeks.  On top of that, it’s filmed and scored like softcore porn on late night Skinemax.

Director Peter Hyams (A Sound of Thunder, Sudden Death, The Relic) knows how to deliver what Van Damme fans want!  And that does not include a very sound story.  We are rich with clichés as the bad guys kill his wife and needlessly explode his giant house, the time travel portals conveniently appear wherever they are needed and smack of the subsequent show Sliders (1995-2000 Sci-Fi Channel; which may have copied Timecop, in fact), and I don’t even have an explanation for Van Damme’s hair.

When I see her face it reminds me…

of when Quaid wanted Cohaagen to give the people da’ air!

The thing that really makes this highly rewatchable movie work is that Van Damme is clearly having fun with this role—as he often does with his cheeky charm.  This is most evident during his first time travel fight scene in Wall Street.  His cheeky lines, his sudden straddle dodge, his stick strike to the nuts—sometimes I imagine they had to do extra takes because he’d burst out into laughter.  The kicks in the face are numerous, so are the gunfire evasive dive rolls, and I’m happy for Van Damme.  His career never saw paydays like Schwarzenegger or Stallone, but he always seemed to embrace his characters (at least, up until this point in his career).

About now I’d like to pause and assess how we know this is a bad movie (as if it wasn’t yet obvious):

1. How was there not a single jump spin kick in this entire movie!?!?!?! That’s JCVD’s thing!  Also, much to my surprise, there is very little in terms of sweaty biceps shots.  #JumpSpinKickFAIL

2. This takes place in “the future” in 2004. Man, I can’t wait for 2004! The cars may look like Back to the Future’s DeLorean and Total Recall’s Johnny Cab had a mutant baby… but they drive themselves!  And the TV and voicemail in his house are voice-command.

3. There are these two goons with matching death metal hair and giant twin hoop earrings. Shouldn’t goons of high level criminals be more discrete? So was this like a thematic rematch of sorts?

4. After being found guilty of “time travel with the intent to alter the future” a guy is sentenced to death. But the death is carried out by letting him fall from a building in 1929 where he was impersonating a Wall Street investor.  Wouldn’t that alter the future?  When 1929 cops cannot link this supposedly wealthy investor to anyone who actually existed?  Isn’t that sort of a big ripple.  Oh, and he did already buy 100,000 shares of oil stock.  What about those ripples?  Jobs, the economy, increased financial disparity between classes…? Jobs and money affecting if certain parents ever met and had kids…like so the kid who grew up to invent time travel would have never been born because his dad didn’t get “that” job and meet “that” woman at “that” time.

5. The evil presidential hopeful slams his consultant’s head into a car window for giving him bad news. I love this!

6. Watch out for the knife fight in the kitchen fight scene. They replay the same set of attacks/parries 2-4 times back to back really fast as if we wouldn’t notice…just like they replayed the same jump spin kick footage (vs Chong Li) in Bloodsport…just like they replayed the same stunts (vs China) and punch combo (vs Khan) footage in The Quest. This wasn’t the only Timecop offense, the girl’s (Gloria Reuben; Robot, Falling Skies, Silk Stalkings) palm strike and some rainy finale punching were replayed, too.  Was this common in 80s and 90s action movies, or does Van Damme just get too tired to film more moves? Adding insult to injury, the Asian knife fighter outspinkicks Van Damme’s spin kick! #SpinKickFAIL #KnifeFightFAIL #ReplayFAIL

7. Also during that knife fight Van Damme seems to “parry” several attacks in a row by simply holding the knife perfectly still in front of his face as if it was a powerful magnet! LOL. Terrible! #ParryFAIL

8. Evidently if you expose water to 50K volts of electricity, it can hold the charge and electrocute someone several seconds later. #PhysicsFAIL

9. I don’t think their time travel launch car ever hit 88 mph! #BacktotheFutureFAIL

10. Did they rip off the launch car from The Running Man (1987).

11. “Never interrupt me when I’m talking to myself.” An incredibly silly line delivered by the villain with an incredibly straight face.

12. No one can deny that the liquid nitrogen arm shatter scene was a blatant (and playful) rip-off of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Not gonna’ lie, I laughed.

13. Okay, I am now CERTAIN that Van Damme gets the giggles over hitting people in the balls. In The Quest the Chinese fighter monkey punches the Brazilian in the balls and the Scottish guy loses to a punch to the balls right under the kilt from the Turk.  In Bloodsport the Sumo wrestler gets punched in the nuts by the African monkey boy and a Van Damme split testicular uppercut.  And now in Timecop, Van Damme whips a guy in the balls with a stick and then two guys get shot in the balls during the rainy rooftop finale.

14. “The same matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time.” Three times we are informed of this! But at least by the third we got some awful effects as the bad guy ate it and melted into pink ooze.

For the most part, this is not a movie for technical fight choreography snobs who live for the likes of Tony Jaa (Ong Bak), Scott Adkins (Undisputed 2-3, Universal Solder: Day of Reckoning), Michael Jai White (Undisputed 2, Blood and Bone), Jason Statham (Mechanic: Resurrection), or Iko Uwais (The Raid: Redemption).  There’s nothing particularly wowing about the martial arts.  However, a few stunts steal the show.  We mentioned the washer/dryer jump split, he makes good use of a towel and an over-the-arm kick to the face, and the quality of the fights was highly satisfying.  But I’d call these “action movie fights” more than “martial arts movie” fights, if you feel my drift.

Van Damme ends up saving the day by stopping an evil time travelling senator from buying the presidency and, along the way, he hits 3 out of 4 on the Van Damme staples: a Belgian butt shot (with Mia Sara), splits during a fight (x2), tandem jump spin kicks (sadly absent), and a sappy closing scene with the subject of his motivation (his son whom he meets for the first time).

Most of Van Damme’s pre-1995 movies have high rewatchability, and this is no exception.  In fact, this JCVD movie had quite a bit of Schwarzenegger style and appeal to it, making Van Damme feel like a more typical action hero than normal.  I highly recommend it to anyone who ever liked pretty much any Van Damme movie.

If you enjoy this stuff please buy it, watch it, then join our nostalgia by listening to our Van Damme podcast episode!

MY CALL:  If Ice-T’s Surviving the Game (1994) and Van Damme’s Hard Target (1993) had a sweaty-muscled child, and that abtastic child was hunted for sport and could do fancy jump spin kicks—that would be this bad movie.  This was one of Adkins’ weaker movies, in my opinion—and I’m an Adkins fan in general.  But hey, I laughed a lot.  So there’s that.  MOVIES LIKE Hard Target 2:  Surviving the Game (1994) and Hard Target (1993) are the obvious choices—since they, in combination, are the equivalent of this week’s Bad Movie Tuesday feature.  You should also turn to other Van Damme movies, of course!  Especially Bloodsport (1988), Lionheart (1990), Timecop (1994) and The Quest (1996).  Want something a bit more “campy bad?” If that’s the case, try China O’Brien (1990), Outside the Law (2002), Night Vision (1997), Only the Strong (1993) or Mechanic: Resurrection (2016).

This completely unwarranted sequel was made by the king of unwarranted sequels!  Director Roel Reiné (The Marine 2, Death Race 2, Death Race 3: Inferno, The Scorpion King 3, 12 Rounds 2, The Man with the Iron Fists 2, The Condemned 2; any of which make for an excellent Bad Movie Tuesday) has long proven that he can take excellently entertaining flicks and make subpar sequels out of them that no one really ever expected, needed or even wanted.  He doesn’t have any decent “part ones” under his belt yet, and I’m not sure he ever will.

Decked out with crossbows and dirt bikes, a group of hunters track down their unarmed fare in this completely unwarranted and long-delayed sequel to Van Damme’s Hard Target (1993).  But since Jean-Claude Van Damme (Timecop, Bloodsport, The Expendables 2, Universal Solder: Day of Reckoning, Assassination Games) has shared the screen with Scott Adkins (Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, The Expendables 2, Universal Solder: Day of Reckoning, El Gringo, Assassination Games) several times now, it’s fair to say the torch is being passed.

Adkins plays Wes, a mixed martial arts fighter, and his opening Vegas fight is scored and acted like it was the final fight at the end of some Rocky knockoff.  And folks, I love Scott Adkins, but let’s just be honest and say the acting is bad.  Adkins uses his most gruffly deep possible voice to sound tough and I’m not so convinced.  Thankfully his voice reverts back to normal later.

It’s like a reverse Van Damme movie, because instead of avenging his friend (Bloodsport) or brother (Kickboxer) in the ring, he nearly kills his best friend!  Then, guilt stricken, Wes moves to Bangkok to pull a Leaving Las Vegas (1995), drinking himself into oblivion.  But apparently he mixes the liquor with his protein powder and takes swigs between sit-ups since he has been somehow maintaining his strikingly lean abs.  Oh, and did I mention he woke up hungover and sleeping among doves—yes, I said DOVES!  Does the director think he’s John Woo (Face/Off, Hard Boiled, Hard Target)?!?!?

Adkins’ abs may be amazing, but the fight choreography is only “decent” and far below Adkins’ potential (e.g., Undisputed).  But a fight is not as good as the best martial artist—rather it is limited by the worst.  He pulls some of his trademark stunts out of his bag of tricks, including his 540 jump spinning hook kick and aerial split kick.  The stunts look great!  It’s just the exchange of techniques between fighters that is left wanting.  In Undisputed 2 (2006) he worked opposite Michael Jai White (one of the best in the business), here he faces the worst on-screen capoeirista (I think that’s what he was doing) I’ve ever seen.  What happened to the guys from The Protector (2005) and The Quest (1996), huh?  Just sad.

His underground fighting circuit mixes Lionheart (1990) and Fighting (2009), but lacks the charm of either.  Then the slick Aldrich (Robert Knepper; R.I.P.D., Heroes, Prison Break) enters the underground fighting scene, discovers Wes’ talent, and offers Wes a solution to his recent financial hardships.  What Wes doesn’t realize is that the “fight” he agrees to turns out to be a fight for his life!

Rhona Mitra (Doomsday, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, Skinwalkers), looking AMAZING at 40 by the way, cheeses up the screen with her fair share of ill-delivered B-movie lines as well.  She joins Aldrich and four other well-equipped hunters against Wes, who learns that all he gets is a water bottle and a two-minute head start in the middle of the jungles of Myanmar.

About now I’d like to pause and assess some additional ways that we know this is a bad movie (as if it wasn’t yet obvious):

1. Adkins accuses an elephant of “throwing the first punch” with a straight face.

2. Firing a crossbow in slow-motion with CGI arrows doesn’t make it look any better. They seem to think it does, though.  Maybe that’s why so many action shots were also in slow-motion.  And why crossbows.  Is this because of Daryl Dixon?

3. Again, what’s with the doves???

4. Aldrich pays “the Republic of Myanmar” (aka, a corrupt general) as a free pass to hunt people in the jungle. So bad!

5. I think they only named this Hard Target 2 hoping to get some Hard Target money off Van Damme’s fanfare.

6. When the hunters need something, Aldrich just waives his hand and it seems to appear. Guns, four-wheel drive vehicles, tracking systems, surveillance drones, motorcycles with more toys than the Batmobile… it gets annoying.

7. Too many motorcycles.  Ever since Jurassic World (2015), folks don’t really seem to care about motorcycle chases through the jungle unless velociraptors are involved.  And no, there are no velociraptors in this.

8. Rhona Mitra walking far too casually in front of an explosion. She also takes really big hits way too well…like she was the T-1000 or something. Barf!

9. Using violence against women and rape as casually as the opportunity presents itself. Come on, now.  This isn’t the exploitation era nor is this anything of an exploitation movie.  It’s just crass.

10. We could often see Adkins’ knee pads through his jeans. That’s just lazy.

11. We spend too long watching Wes learn to appreciate the local culture, hearing his past and nightmares explained, and talking about getting to the Thai border. This isn’t Kickboxer (1989)… ergo, I don’t care about any of this exposition.

12. Aldrich sips a beer while he watches his henchman fight Wes. The scenario is even more ridiculous than you’d think.  He watches Wes beat his five henchman, then he watches him crush his right-hand man… he basically gives Wes every possible opportunity to win when, in fact, Aldrich had every opportunity to eliminate his liability.

13. The ending makes no sense. Wes should have died.  This was really stupid.

But for all its faults, and they number high, this flick is not without some serious bad movie charm.  Adkins kicks Mitra through a wall and I laughed out loud, the slow-motion water fight may not have been technically impressive but it definitely brought out my inner bro, and there are also some gorgeous jungle shots.

This is clearly among Adkins’ weaker movies.  But if you go in expecting it to suck, you should get a few laughs and see a few decent stunts that may or may not make it worth it for you in the end.

MY CALL:  This is exactly the Indonesian fantasy/action B-movie Terminator honorarium you’ve been waiting for!  Enjoy.  MORE MOVIES LIKE Lady Terminator:  For more Indonesian action/fantasy madness try The Devil’s Sword (1984).

Before we start, I think it’s critical that you understand just how classy this film is.  Because director H. Tjut Djalil (as Jalil Jackson; Mystics in Bali, Dangerous Seductress, Satan’s Bed) knows how to keep things classy.  Just listen to this IMDB synopsis: “The spirit of an ancient evil queen possesses the body of a young anthropology student, who then goes on a murderous rampage.”

Just to prove he means classy business, Djalil opens the film with a tastefully clothes-on sex scene culminating in the man dying because…well…something flesh-rending was evidently going on “down there” in her nether regions.  I’m reminded of movies like Teeth (2007), Evil Clutch (1988) and The Night of Something Strange (2016)…only this little Indonesian fantasy/Sci-Fi/action film turns out to be much more complicated. You see, her next lover “defeats” her by removing an eel from her—you know—which was evidently eating the penises of her past lovers in coitus.  He then magically turns her crotch eel into a dagger (don’t ask how, he just does it like he had been doing it for years) and she is furious about it!  So, she curses him: “In 100 years I’ll have my revenge on your great-granddaughter!”

Not much of a curse is it?  It seems to me that when you curse the descendant of a descendant of a descendant of the person who wronged you, the cursed person won’t live to see it. Not a significant punishment at all, if you ask me.  So, to prepare herself for this curse she wanders into the sea to join other evil forces or something.  Perhaps if I was more educated on Indonesian mythology, this all would have made perfect sense.

100 years later Tania (Barbara Anne Constable) finds a creepy book on the Southern Sea Queen from a creepy man in a library with a creepy taxidermy display.  She informs us of her credibility with such lines as “I’m not a lady. I’m an anthropologist.” During a routine anthropological scuba-diving expedition she is teleported to an unreasonably large bed and raped by an eel, resulting in her apparent possession. Things typically don’t go well for anthropologists in horror films (e.g., Cannibal Holocaust, The Serpent and the Rainbow) do they?

Based on the ensuing events, this film clearly becomes a cautionary tale for those who would engage in unprotected anonymous sex with strangers in the 80s.  Tania emerges from the water and does her best nude T-800 walk, even turning her head like Arnold and stiffly strolling around naked until she meets some local punks and “sexes them to death” with her intrauterine eel—FYI, that part was not stolen from Terminator.

It’s as campy as it gets. We see a lot of boobs, the blood spurts are silly, and she steals a punk’s leather jacket (just like Arnie).  Now she just needs to find Sarah Conner…errrr…that long dead cursed guy’s great-granddaughter.

I’m sure we’ve firmly established the badness of this film, but here are some additional ways we know this is a bad movie:

1. During an improvised gynecological exam, a man pulls an eel from a vagina and is, in no way, shocked.
2. With no disclaimed wizardry schooling, he straightens that eel into a dagger!
3. This film was based on the Indonesian legend/Goddess The Queen of the Southern Sea. If Terminator was also based on this, I had no idea.
4. The star actress also received top billing for make-up. Two pay checks, girl!
5. This film was also released as Nasty Hunter. Nasty Hunter = CLASSY!
6. Intrauterine eel rape and eel penis-eating.
7. Topless telekinetic mediation sessions in a sleazy hotel.
   
8. Apparently simply shooting a car in an 80s B-movie results in an explosion!
9. When killing men with sex just won’t do, Tania-nator gets an automatic weapon and shoots like 10 guys in the dick just like Kung Fury’s Triceracop!
   
10. She cuts out her eyeball with a pen knife…just to wash it off!
11. Eye lasers. She shoots laser beams from her eyes!
    
12. Oh, right! A woman kills men by having sex with them…to death!

This films begins about as original as they come, but then steers right into a Terminator copycat with a skewed premise.  Warlock (1989) was also a Terminator (1984) rip-off, although a bit less overtly so.  But you know what?  I’d highly recommend this to any B-movie fan, and this is clearly on the high end of B-movie quality.

All the way to the dumbly-dialogued action-packed finale, this movie tries really hard to give you a lot. A lot of nudity, a lot of bullets, a lot of eel bites to the dick, and a lot of zany nonsense.  This is a B-movie cult favorite for a reason.

MY CALL:  This movie is awesome…but bad.  But it’s not a bad movie really…yet it is bad like a 90s Schwarzenegger movie…but one of the better 90s Schwarzenegger movies.  There, now you understand, right?  MORE MOVIES LIKE The Arrival:  For more mid-90s sci-fi alien invasions threatening humanity, I highly recommend Independence Day (1996), Men in Black (1997) and Species (1995).  Sphere (1998) and Contact (1997) took less invasion-y approaches.  If you want to kick the bonkers into high gear, go for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), Jupiter Ascending (2015) and The Fifth Element (1997).  Speaking of bonkers Sci-Fi films…we’ve podcasted about many of these films.  Check out Episode 84: Sci-Fi Past & Present, The Arrival (1996) and Arrival (2016) and Episode 81: Bonkers Sci-Fi Past & Present Extravaganza, The Fifth Element & Jupiter Ascending.

Writer and director David Twohy (the Pitch Black/Riddick trilogy, A Perfect Getaway) is no stranger to thrillers, having written The Fugitive (1993) and Waterworld (1995) as well as Warlock (1989).  He’s had experience with horror, suspense, and fantastic worlds littered with post-apocalyptic jet skis.  Combining many such notions (but no jet skis), this might just by Twohy’s most zany film ever.

Climate researcher Ilana (Lindsay Crouse; Mr. Brooks, Imposter) discovers a green grassy meadow lush with wildflowers in the middle of the arctic, as if the sun picked that one spot to turn up the heat and melt the snow.  One problem: even if it was preternaturally warmed in that single patch of land, it’s the arctic! Where did the seeds for those 15 species of plants come from!?!?! How about the nutrients needed to grow? But whatever, Twohy did make write a horror movie about a time-traveling male witch modeled after The Terminator (1984). So we need not be so critical. LOL

Meanwhile across the globe, astronomers Zane (Charlie Sheen; Machete Kills, The Chase) and Calvin (Richard Schiff; Man of Steel, The West Wing) stumble across the discovery of a lifetime when they record an alien radio signal from another galaxy.  They know they’re on to something major, but their administrative superior Phil Gordian (Ron Silver; Timecop, The Entity) is understandably skeptical.  Worse yet, due to suspiciously timed budget cuts, Zane gets laid off.

Despite getting fired and failing to confirm the signal with colleagues managing other satellite stations, Gordian agrees to pass the signal recording to decoding analysists…but instead destroys it as soon as Zane is out the door and sets him up as a fraud.  Oh, and his love life has been getting rocky with his girlfriend Char (Teri Polo; Meet the Parents).  Things just aren’t going very well for Zane.

“Bad Movie” Highlights:  No astronomer has hair that is so carefully manicured and attended with product.  Even when he is manic, paranoid, hasn’t shaved in days and on the verge of a nervous breakdown over being framed…his hair is always immaculate.

Now blacklisted from astronomy and working as a satellite cable technician, Zane highjacks an entire county’s dish service to search for his alien radio signal.  I’m safely going to assume this is not plausible, and that we have wandered into a bonkers movie.  After a trip to radio shack and some shady “free upgrades” for cable subscribers, Zane has created a NASA SETI-capable radio analysis lab above his garage.  I’m happy to afford the movie some leeway, but somewhere between the attempted assassination-by-bathtub scene and the knee-popping grasshopper jump I think all reason has been thrown out the window.

“Bad Movie” Highlights:  The reverse-knee high jump. The effects were laughable.

Climatologist Ilana has been looking into more strange things as well, like impossible predictions that global warming will cook the planet in 10 years.  Oh, remember when I said all reason was thrown out the window?  Well, Zane sees a now mustached and “more ethnic-looking” Gordian-clone working as a security guard at a Mexican power facility!  And, of course, there was the subsequent assassination attempt, this time using a pair of perfectly harmless scorpions that your kids could buy at a pet store in New Jersey.  Way to utilize that alien super-technology!

Twohy really tried to make this story global.  Zane starts in the southwestern United States and Ilana in the arctic, both ending up tracking the alien signal and global warming trends (respectively) to Oaxaca, Mexico.  Despite this global aim, the $25 million budget film only grossed $14 million box office.  Bummer.  Because, although I’m admittedly making fun of this movie quite a bit, it was a BLAST and I was happy to buy this on blu-ray!  This is the kind of silly movie that maintains a strong sense of urgency—like True Lies (1994), Timecop (1994) or Total Recall (1990).

The alien CGI effects are clearly dated, but not bad. They may not stand up to Jurassic Park (1993) or Independence Day (1996), but they also didn’t enjoy such a big budget.  Despite the more humble financing, the diversity of effects is ambitious!  Lots of alien future tech, numerous alien scenes, and the most joyously silly effect was when Zane used the alien transformation chamber and became “Latin Charlie Sheen.”

“Bad Movie” Highlights:  Latino Charlie Sheen: “I look like a can of smashed assholes.” Best quote ever!

Yes, the aliens have been living among us.  And much like They Live (1988), they have commandeered industry to use our economy and environment against us.  But no one should fear, for as long as there’s a shirtless Charlie Sheen (freshly waxed, as you would expect any astronomer to be), humanity will persevere.  You’ve gotta’ hand it to Sheen.  He’s no Hugh Jackman, but he’s trying!

“Bad Movie” Highlights:  Did they think Sheen had a great body?  Because he spends a lot of time showing off his freshly waxed and often sweat-glazed body running around without a shirt.

If you haven’t seen this, you should.  If you don’t believe me, you should listen to our podcast about this movie (Episode 84: Sci-Fi Past & Present, The Arrival (1996) and Arrival (2016), and then go see this movie!

MY CALL:  Overall, this feels more like a cheap police movie than a martial arts movie.  The humor never seems to work, and the non-martial arts action is terrible.  Just fast-forward to Rothrock-Michiko fight in the end.  MOVIES LIKE City Cops:  Well, don’t watch Outside the Law (2002) or Night Vision (1997) unless you’re looking for proper Bad Movie Tuesday material.  Not Rothrock’s best work.  Instead, I’d turn to China O’Brien (1990) or better yet, Yes, Madam (1985).

Also released as Fight to Win and Miao tan shuang long, this is the quintessential Bad Movie Tuesday, complete with bad English dubbing and a paper-thin storyline. Things that don’t seem to matter constantly transpire and little ever makes any sense. We have tape recordings with damning evidence (e.g., Hard to Kill), haphazard gun fights, laughable dialogue, stolen diamonds, over-used sound effects every time someone swings a pocket knife, dirty cops, and a lot of misogyny.

Inspector Cindy (Cynthia Rothrock;  China O’Brien, Night Vision, Outside the Law, Undefeatable) is an American FBI agent working with local law enforcement in Hong Kong.  Why…?  Does it matter?  Not really.  I can’t even explain any of the three titles of this movie.

The first 35 minutes are devastatingly boring. The highlight is a completely lame bar fight that squanders Rothrock’s skills.  I’m assuming none of the stuntmen could handle basic choreography.  Thankfully the fights (and her opposition) get much better the deeper we venture into the running time.  I fear little in her filmography will measure up to her outstanding work in Yes, Madam (1985), but at least this is serviceable (in brief parts).  The sai-swordplay is good and there are some occasional decent acrobatics.

Fight Scene SIDEBAR: I’m not saying Rothrock isn’t impressive in this movie—probably not worthy of the Queen of Martial Arts moniker.  I’m just saying if she had the luxury of enjoying Tony Jaa (Ong-Bak), Iko Uwais (The Raid: Redemption) or Michael Jai White (Undisputed 2) as her opposition, she could show her full ability.  I’ve seen the same situation arise in Scott Adkins’ movies, in which he can only look as talented (or as unimpressive) as his worst stuntman (e.g., Hard Target 2).  For example, Rothrock has kicked someone like 10,000 times—so when she kicks someone the kick looks good.  But an actor that hasn’t “been kicked” too often looks like a stuntman school dropout in this movie.

We find a bunch of discount store bad guys—one has a cigarette immediately after finishing his sword practice in his office, another wears a bandana with a suit while conducting a cash briefcase transaction, others are dime-a-dozen goons that never seem to have guns when they need them.

Overall, this feels more like a police/crime action movie that happens to have some martial arts rather than a martial arts movie.  The martial arts are most satisfying during the big fight finale when Cindy faces Michiko (Michiko Nishiwaki; stunt woman).  Here the choreography captures the technique and grandeur of proper Kung Fu theater (or, close enough for this movie).

This was actually marketed as an action/crime comedy, but the humor never seems to hit—not even when you can tell it’s trying to be really clever.  Likewise, the non-martial arts action is terrible (in one scene I’m pretty sure a guy fired four times and five bad guys dropped).  The only reason to watch this is for the Rothrock-Michiko fight.  If you don’t watch this (for mockery) with friends, I’d suggest just fast-forwarding to that.