It's simply a few situations that are thrown in to lead into fights, but the fights come thick and fast, and as well as that they are original, and pretty awesome. This may have a plot that could have been written on the back of a match box, probably reading something along the lines of "Michael Jai White is forced to fight Scott Adkin's, twice!" However the film looks polished thanks to Ross Clarkson's photography, while Florentine is allowed to show some auterism that many DTV directors for hire aren't allowed to. They feel unique too, much down to Adkin's himself but also the great photography, dolly and steadi-cam work. He's not a bad actor either and I think people will actually assume he's Russian, so he does a good job here, despite playing a comically two dimensional villains worthy of Ivan Drago himself.
Adkin's performs some amazing gymnastic feats here. If marketed right Adkins could be the next big action star, he's got the ability to be one of the best. Adkin's not only has a good screen presence but like White is built like a brick outhouse, and to add to that he's an amazing athlete for a guy so huge. However the real star of this piece is Scott Adkins, the British born, Kickboxer/Gymnast, here playing a Russian prison tournament champ. Ken Lerner too makes a welcome appearance playing a role we've seen many times before from him, and he of course he'll always be remembered as the agent, Arnold stabs in the back with a pen, in Running Man. He does well in making his supporting part memorable in a fairly tragic kind of role, and he gives it some humanity and some humour. Ben Cross also appears and as he did in the Lundgren flick, the Mechanik, he adds class to proceedings, because he can act. Strangely he's not much of an action star despite the huge muscular frame and martial arts prowess. White doe okay, and has the build and a certain amount of charisma that makes you wonder why he's not competing in the DTV wars with the top dogs like Seagal, Snipes and Van Damme. Previously too he never really got any particularly good performances form his cast, be manages to here. But Florentine has reigned himself in here, and in what is probably his most high profile and lavish production, he has produced a kick ass action film. For example someone would raise an eyebrow and it would be accompanied by a "whoosh!" Having said all that I enjoyed his previous films for the action and the cheesiness of them. Also his use of cartoony sound effects for every movement, no matter how small, become tiresome in previous flicks.
Bridge Of Dragon's for example was a pretty bog standard kind of fairy tale action movie. Similarly Florentine's previous films tended have bizarre mixes of time periods, costumes etc, to create non descript worlds, which just came out as strange on film. Similarly his films never really look too polished, unable to look beyond their clearly meagre budgets. Anyway director Isaac Florentine has always shown a knack for filming fight scenes, without ever really getting the rest particularly right. He's not playing the Wesley Snipes character as we might have assumed, considering White has been rumoured to be replacement Blade for Snipes, and after all Snipes and White are both martial arts demon's.
Michael Jai White stars as George "the Ice Man" Chambers, played in the original by Ving Rhames. Now surely there must be more to the plot? Well no, it is essentially an excuse to have some downright superb fight scenes. Bizarrely a sequel to a film no one saw, about boxing, only this time it's about kickboxing.
0 kommentar(er)
