Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.
I’ll admit to being at something of a disadvantage when it comes to reviewing Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor. You see, while Kickboxer 1-3 were sweeping the nation, I was serving time in a Turkish prison for a youthful indiscretion. (Okay, they caught me attempting to transport bootleg copies of The Turkish Wizard of Oz out of the country. This was before YouTube, people!) Luckily for me, the makers of Kickboxer 4 were kind enough to pad out the first ten minutes of their movie with extensive clips from the previous installments, so while some of the nuances of the story arc may be lost on me, I think I got the gist.
As Kickboxer 4 opens, our hero Sloan (played by a block of wood with a Vanilla Ice haircut named Sasha Mitchell) is in jail, having been framed for a crime by the villainous Tong Po. As we learn through flashbacks, Po killed Sloan’s brother, who was avenged by Jean Claude Van Damme in a loincloth. I think it’s safe to assume this happened in the first Kickboxer movie. Now Po has kidnapped and raped Sloan’s wife, and Sloan is thirsty for vengeance.
His quest is aided by the DEA, who offer him a deal: they will spring him from prison if he will travel to Po’s Mexican headquarters under an assumed identity, enter his Day of the Dead tournament and, well, kill him. Sloan accepts, and in his foolproof disguise of a pair of sunglasses and a slightly more gravelly voice, he makes his way to Mexico to compete in the tournament, rescue his wife and take down the villainous – and strangely drag-queenish – Po.
Of course, this story is only the most threadbare clothesline possible on which to hang as many sessions of roundhouse kicking, neck-snapping and nut-crunching as possible. If you put 100 monkeys in a room with 100 typewriters and asked them all to write a kickboxing movie, 99 of them would come up with this one. But let’s be honest – anyone who watches Kickboxer 4 on purpose is expecting and hoping for only one thing: lots of people getting kicked in the face. On that score it delivers, but to my untrained eye, the fights are rote and unimaginative. There is an unexpected softcore ménage a trois that managed to hold my attention, but the most interesting aspect of Kickboxer 4 is the resume of its writer/director Albert Pyun. He directed Kickboxer 2: The Road Back, but not Kickboxer 3: The Art of War. Among his other works: Adrenalin: Fear the Rush, Nemesis 4: Death Angel, Bulletface and Brain Smasher: A Love Story. Folks, I have a feeling we’ll be seeing Mr. Pyun again before this is over with.
Previously on
Unwatchable:
99. The Honeymooners
100. Devil Fish