Released: February 2018
Director: Dmitri Logothetis
Rated R
Run Time: 110 Minutes
Distributor: Well Go USA
Genre: Action
Cast:
Alain Moussi: Kurt Sloan
Christopher Lambert: Thomas Moore
Jean-Claude Van Damme: Master Durand
Mike Tyson: Briggs
Sara Malakul Lane: Liu
Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson: Mongkut
Sam Medina: Crawford
During the late 80’s and early 90’s, Jean-Claude Van Damme was at the height of his stardom. When he showed up in Bloodsport, he took the world by storm. While the film was not great, it ended up being one of the best American-made martial arts movies of all time. I still watch it from time to time. It’s that good. Van Damme had a lot of memorable movies including Cyborg, Kickboxer, Universal Soldier, Hard Target, Nowhere To Run, and Double Impact. Not only was Mr. Van Damme a fantastic fighter and martial artist, he had an incredible amount of screen presence and charisma that sold him as a legitimate action star. However, I would not consider Kickboxer to be one of his greatest. I think it was just too damn goofy to be taken seriously. Don’t get me wrong, the fight with Tong Po at the end was spectacular, but the rest of the film was……not up to the usual standard that Van Damme was producing at the time. The less said about the sequels to Kickboxer, the better. A couple of years ago, we got ourselves a reboot of Kickboxer called Kickboxer: Vengeance. This film starred up-and-coming action star Alain Moussi in the role of Kurt Sloan with Dave Bautista as Tong Po. Jean-Claude Van Damme returned to play Durand, the man who trained Kurt and his brother. That was a movie that had problems in terms of pacing and fight choreography. It wasn’t awful, at least in my opinion, but a lot of people didn’t like it. Now, we have a sequel, Kickboxer: Retaliation. Does this film fix the mistakes made by the first movie?
The story for Retaliation picks up a year and a half after Kurt killed Tong Po. After winning an MMA fight, Kurt is kidnapped by illegal fight promotor Thomas Moore to force him to fight the monstrous Mongkut. Refusing to do so, Kurt is imprisoned and his wife is kidnapped in order to force Kurt to face Mongkut in a battle to the death. It’s a pretty simple setup for a fight movie, so it can be somewhat forgiven for being so….plain. Unfortunately, there a number of things that really don’t make sense. Kurt gets kidnapped by fake FBI agents and flown to Bangkok. How does that work? You would expect somebody to raise a red flag for something like, especially with today’s airport security. Whatever. Kurt’s wife, Liu used to be a cop, but is now basically a damsel in distress. Really? You couldn’t give her more than that. The story is plain, but it’s bogged down by some really questionable writing. Not only that, Van Damme’s character is now blind. Why didn’t we see what happened to him? He just showed up out of the blue at exactly the same prison that Kurt is in?
For a film like Kickboxer: Retaliation, you really can’t expect Oscar-worthy performances, because you will not get them. They’re okay enough to push the story along, but nobody here will be winning an award any time soon. With all due respect to Alain Moussi, who is clearly a talented martial artist and athlete, he’s really not an actor, although he seems to be more comfortable in his role as Kurt Sloan this time around. I’m not necessarily blaming Alain for that, but he’s been surrounded by larger personalities than he is. For one, Jean-Claude Van Damme is back and actually gives a pretty good performance. Christopher Lambert chews the scenery like it’s nobody’s business as the illegal fight promoter and he’s always fun to watch. While it doesn’t really make sense for Mike Tyson to be in here, he’s also fun to watch, because despite his age, he can still move like the professional boxer he used to be. He’s clearly having fun here. The guy that plays Mongkut, is clearly an intimidating presence, as he is over 6’9″ and weighs well over 350 pounds. That’s all muscle. He’s not much of an actor, but he doesn’t need to be when he wants to be intimidating.
Since this is a Kickboxer film, you would expect some pretty solid fight scenes, right? Not exactly. While there are a lot of sequences that are pretty cool, the fight scenes are hamstrung by an overuse of slow-motion. The amount of slow-motion used in this film, to me, is a lot like the use of shaky-cam in fight movies: It’s used to hide some really bad choreography. Alain Moussi had a hand in some of the fight choreography, which is why not all of it sucks. He’s clearly got an idea of how fight scenes should play out. Again, the problem is the use of slow-motion. I don’t mind when slo-mo is used to highlight certain moves or stunts. That doesn’t bother me at all. What bothers me is when fight sequences that should take maybe a couple of minutes are padded to be longer because of slow-motion. The film runs at 110 minutes when it should only run at 85. Some of the fights are pretty cool. The fight between Kurt and Mongkut is clearly the centerpiece of the film and honestly, it doesn’t disappoint. It’s hard-hitting and pretty freakin’ epic. It’s just too bad not enough effort was spent on making the other fights look as good. Speaking of which, the cinematography is actually really nice. We get some pretty good night shots of Las Vegas and some really beautiful shots of Thailand. Not shabby, if I do say so myself.
Overall, I didn’t hate the film, it has some really good moments, good cinematography and Connor McLeod, I mean, Christopher Lambert. However, it’s not exactly a movie I can flat-out recommend to just anyone. There a number of glaring issues here that I feel that really bring the film down. It’s a sequel that really came out of nowhere and with a third film on the way, I have to wonder how these films get bankrolled. Don’t get me wrong, I want to see Alain Moussi succeed as an action star. I really do. I think he’s got a certain something that could separate him from the rest if he gets the right material. It’s always fun to see Jean-Claude Van Damme in action movie and he can still kick ass with the rest of ’em. However, the excessive use of slow-motion and questionable writing end up making this film a middle-of-the-road action flick. I don’t regret seeing it and I’ll probably watch it again, but Kickboxer: Retaliation only screams “Rent me!”, not “Buy me!” You know what they say, the third time’s the charm. Here’s hoping the next movie is better.
My Final Recommendation: Meh….6/10