King Of The Kickboxers Details

* * * This review contains spoilers * * *ShowHide

Good/bad movie that's kinda cheap yet tolerable!

This film starts off real good with reasonably good acting & fighting yet the scene where Billy Blanks shows up to take on the two brothers is badly acted as well as the scene prior to it where we see the two brothers riding together.

Then comes a nice montage sequence of clips set in New York with touching music, nicely establishing the scene (this was edited by maverick Hong Kong director Marco Mak) and then we see some cheesy acting during this undercover raid sequence where our hero acts way too much like a villain in a cheesy and utterly dreadful manner (the guy he's 'dealing' with is much worse).

Just when you think the film's quality will continue to go up and down continuously, the film has a nice fish eye lens/worms eye view of New York before delivering a scene with good acting and a bad one (when Loren finds out about his assignment and does a Sly Stallone yell to show his trauma - fortunately, the actor himself disliked doing this).

For the most part, the film has good acting with only a few lapses in thespian judgement hampering the overall quality of the film. The fight scenes were choreographed by overlooked genius Tony Leung Siu Heung who choreographed the fight scenes in Wong Jing's Magic Crystal.

Usually Seasonal (the Hong Kong film company who made this film and several of its ilk) would enlist Corey Yuen Kwai to be their action director so he stepped in for Keith's first bout where his 'drunken' master character is not all that drunk.

King Of The Kickboxers has a pretty grim plot concerning snuff movies and it's quite harrowing and disturbing despite the cornball factor!

There's also a major goof on the filmmakers' behalf, when we see Keith Cooke's character in the water we can see some tissue stuffed up his nose.

The film's production values are compensated by some nice explosions such as the one at the end when the cage arena is destroyed and there were lots of extras who portrayed the soldiers and tribes!

All in all, decent entertainment to drown the film's sorrowful qualities in drink.

Just Doesnt Kick Off

Absolutely terrible. Bad fighting (very slow), terrible terrible acting, long slow painful dialogue and Keith Cooke is not used enough as he is clearly the better fighter in this. Avoid.