Directors: Mark DiSalle & David Worth
Stars: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dennis Alexio, Dennis Chan, Haskell V. Anderson III, Rochelle Ashana, Michael Qissi
Kurt Sloane (Van Damme) is the brother of one of the world’s best kickboxers, Eric (Alexio). Sadly they aren’t twins so Van Damme can’t play them both. Eric brags about being the best in the world and eagerly accepts a challenge from a fearsome fighter in Thailand, Tong Po (Qissi). Kurt has a bad feeling about the fight and believes that Eric is being arrogant, and his uneasy feelings are proved right when Tong Po cripples Eric. Angered and fueled by revenge, Kurt is pointed to a master of Muay Thai (Chan), and Kurt begs this master to train him so that he can defeat Tong Po.
There’s a lot of good character work in this. I liked Eric’s arrogance and bravado, and the reactions of Kurt as he sees his brother being brutally beaten. Tong Po is intimating, especially since we’re introduced to him literally kicking cracks in a concrete pole. The beginning is quite hilarious as well, as Kurt is carrying out his brother on a stretcher expecting to be led to a hospital when he’s just left outside of the stadium. At first he tries to commandeer a cab but there’s a problem with the language barrier. Thankfully an American turns up and gives Kurt a hand.
It doesn’t take too long for the training to begin. Xian (Chan) has some good chemistry with Van Damme. He obviously takes delight in torturing Kurt, and its quite funny to see how extreme the training gets (there’s an especially difficult scene to watch where Kurt learns how to do the splits). While training and running errands for Xian, Kurt meets Xian’s niece, Mylee (Ashana). The romance isn’t too overt so it doesn’t overshadow the martial arts and it’s developed fairly naturally. During the training there are some gorgeous shots of Thailand. I think there were opportunities to show more, but what we got was beautiful. There was one particular shot that I loved – Kurt was training against the sun set, he and the structures beside him were silhouettes and the orange sky burned behind him. It showed a visual flair that I would have loved to have permeated the rest of the movie.
Van Damme showed a nice transformation from a man bent on revenge to one that realizes revenge is not a pure enough motivation to learn Muay Thai. I liked the re-introduction of Eric as well, as I was afraid that once he was crippled the film would essentially forget about him.
My only problems with the film come from the ending. I feel that there were a few unnecessary schemes from the antagonists that were a blatant attempt to make them irredeemable. I think there was enough tension going into the fight anyway, and it only served to undercut the threat posed by Tong Po. In the actual fight it seems that Kurt has the ability to win all the time, and is simply holding back because of a threat from one of the antagonists, but I think it would have been more realistic and dramatic if Kurt truly wasn’t sure if he could win. At the beginning Tong Po has the reputation of being the best fighter in Thailand, and indeed he goes on to easily defeat Eric, whose self-confidence, up to that point, was completely justified. I’m just not sure that training Muay Thai for the amount of time that Kurt did was enough to make him so much better than Tong Po, and if it was then it begs the question why no-one else who studied Muay Thai could defeat Tong Po.
I liked the character work and the setting. I thought the training was done well and the romantic elements weren’t overwhelming. Aside from a few issues I have with the climax I enjoyed it. The fight choreography was good and the final battle has enough, ‘hell yeah!’ moments. It’s also a good pace and I didn’t feel it dragged at any point. I don’t think it’s as good as Bloodsport or some other Van Damme films, but Kickboxer is pretty good and it has a more serious tone than some of his later movies.