The Ultimate Weapon (1998)

 

Tagline:

No Fear. No Rules. No Equal.

Movie Review:

I’ve been doing this blog (on and off, let’s be fair) since 2011. So how have I made it this far without a Hulk Hogan film amongst the ranks? That was something I was determined to fix with The Ultimate Weapon!

Ben Cutter aka Hardball (Hulk Hogan) is an ex soldier, now contract mercenary for hire. He is given a job along with newbie Dean (Carl Marotte, The Park is Mine) aka Cobra (named Cobra because that was his dad’s callsign… Cobra) to be the strike force that takes out an illegal gun runners fortress, codename: Shamrock (a name that should have been a dead giveaway, but I digress). After laying waste to the compound, the UN weapons recovery team helicopter in to clean up. Cutter is not convinced they are actually UN (thick Irish accents a dead giveaway of IRA ties, I guess), so following his instincts blows the absolute shit out of the compound from the safe distance of the (now stolen) helicopter, giving us the first tremendous explosions of the movie. This action has a ripple effect: the wealthy IRA buyer of the guns, McBride (Daniel Pilon, Scanners III) is angry and wants revenge, determines that Cutter’s daughter Mary Kate (Cynthia Preston) is the weak spot so kidnaps her, luring Cutter into his trap of revenge.

This was a great time. No messing around here, no overly complex plots. Just a solid late 90s body count movie with an of-the-time-appropriate stolen flash drive subplot (though I would have also accepted CD ROM, or better yet, Minidiscs posing as data storage) with a side dish of unsatisfied wife and daughter. The Ultimate Weapon knows what it is and embraces it, at least as far as TV movies can go with these things. It starts off as a commando movie, has a befriend-and-protect estranged daughter second act, and an escape and revenge third act. The acting across the board is passable (even Hogan, he’s just in full 80’s Arnie mode and it’s actually pretty good) and being late 90s we haven’t hit shaky-cam DTV era yet. We get a blazing first act, a slower but more methodical second act and a nice wrap up in the third. All you really need in this kind of film.

Starting off first, Ben Cutter is a badass. The first scene we see him in he’s in a Canadian Tuxedo - denim waistcoat, open to reveal bare chest, and denim jeans - and it’s a marvellous thing. Although not sporting a mullet in the movie, he metaphorically is wearing one. That’s after being roused awake from an entirely slow-motion jungle scene from, presumably, his Vietnam war days where he’s running away from an engaging enemy with a little girl under his arms. He loses his grip, she rolls down a gently hill screaming and he wakes up in denim, in a haystack. Brilliant. Hogan spends most of the film shooting people and looking imposing, though we do get a few shows of brute force you’d expect from a former wrestler. A classy scene in a bar shows Hogan roundhouse kick a guy through a pile of chairs, and then throw another guy over his head into a table. In every case that he is halted with a gun to his face, he manages to get out of it by either a sneaky punch or from the help of his along-for-the-ride partner Cobra. 

Our bad guy McBride is the rich businessman in mansion type, who has many legitimate businesses but one or two illegitimate ones as well. The kind of guy that has men in black just standing around his mansion guarding his Fabergé egg. We even have a scene of him fencing some shmo that works for him. His ploy to get to Cutter involves threatening (sexually) his daughter to draw him out (which it does) and we get a scene of him being strung up in a shooting range designed to test new guns on pig carcasses. That’s a new one for me, but it didn’t scare our boy Cutter. He breaks free, dispatches the goons and gets on about saving the day. 

Speaking of the daughter, Mary Kate, we find her working in a tittle bar. Yes there are boobs in this film, no they were not hers. You have to feel sorry a little for Cutter in this scene, forced to watch his daughter dance sexily for paying drunks. And he may be the absent father of twenty years, but geez she would just not give him a break until the last fifteen minutes of this film when he went missing. A lot of teenage angst in that girl. Honestly the second act of the film with its slower pace, marriage proposals and focus on daddy issues could have spoiled this film, but there’s enough mullets and guns to keep it moving at a fair pace.

One of the things I love about 90’s films “computer hacking” and this film doesn’t leave me wanting in that department. Not only does McBride wear a ‘flash drive’ around his neck (in 1998 no less!) but he stores important illegal information on it under the filename.. SECRET_FILE.DOC. I laughed so hard as our heroes attempted to decrypt the file and that name showed on the screen. Seriously, I love this stuff. 

Now being made for TV the bloodletting was toned down but that’s not to say it wasn’t a solid action film. Plenty of foes were dispatched, especially in the first act, and over the top RPG explosions, machine gun firefights, flipped cars, the works. And there are a few minor gibs at critical points so it’s not all bloodless. It feels like a proper film, just with a slight haze of midday movie to the whole thing - but don’t read into that too much. If you like 90’s action from PM Entertainment or Nu Image then you will enjoy The Ultimate Weapon. The soundtrack of synth rock with wailing guitar solos also earns it an extra point in my book.

Note: the runtime of this UK disc was bang on 90 minutes, but Amazon and IMDB both list the runtime as 110. I don’t know if US VHS or DVDs could possibly be longer so I’m chalking that up to misprint that was repeated as fact.

Highlight:

The final scene in the movie shows one of McBride’s goons crash his car into the side of a bar, when inside McBride himself is standing on a landmine. A slow motion crash followed by a satisfying, humungous explosion and fade to black.

Trailer:

China Salesman aka Zhong guo tui xiao yuan (2017)

Tagline:

Fighting the war to connect the nation.

Movie Review:

I had heard things about this film upfront. I’m not naive when it comes to this kind of film anymore. I know when I see Steven Seagal and Mike Tyson on the cover together, that if - and that’s a big if - the two get to brawl together, it will be for two minutes and then we will see the two stars sitting in chairs on and off throughout the film whilst Third Billing But Actually Main Star Guy takes 90% of the screen time. I went into the film expecting this. What did I get? Read on.

Yan Jian (Dong-xue Li, Brotherhood of Blades), a young Chinese IT engineer in North Africa and helping his company to win a bid for installing a new mobile phone network in the recently war-torn nation. The winning bid will own the rights to control the communication between the south and the north of the continent. French spy Michael (Cloivs Foulin) works for a rival phone company but he also hired the best mercenary in Africa, Lauder (Steven Seagal) and former General Kabbah (Mike Tyson) to help him win. Yan has discovered their conspiracy, and along with his invention that will ensure faster 3G connectivity for all, the full force and forces of the rival company are after him. The plot is utterly ridiculous, but I can’t bring myself to completely blame the writers as apparently this is based on a true story. Rival phone companies actually having a war in Africa over 3G versus CDMA technology is a thing that apparently happened. And China was the one to save the day. There is literal flag waving in the movie.

Let’s get the important thing out of the way first. Yes, Seagal and Tyson fight. And.. it’s pretty damn good, at least when taken at face value. It takes less than ten minutes of the runtime for it to happen and less than fifteen for it to end, but it is exactly the kind of fight I’d want to see between these two. Tyson heavy on the punches, Seagal heavy on the avoidance tactics and his patented slap-fu. The reason for the fight though? Tyson didn’t want to drink whiskey because of religious reasons, so Seagal served him up a gallon of piss. Yup. Actual piss. So Tyson beats the living shit out of Seagal’s henchmen, then the room, and then Seagal (I was impressed with that knockout, as ol' Steve usually doesn’t allow his characters to lose). Forget the fact that as we learn later in the film, these two are on the same side. Tyson rounds out the scene with the line; “Motherfucker, YOU drink piss!”. They could have run the credits at this point and made the best short action film in years. But alas, we have another 105 minutes to go.

The bulk of the film is political drama between Yan and his company, he rival phone company represented by the deranged Michael, and supposed neutral adjudicator Susanna (Janicke Askevold) who ends up helping Yan at the same time as saying his company is shit. Michael as a vile frenchman is equally awful as it is hilarious, straight out of James Bond Evil Bad-guy world. Then we are filled up with boardroom meetings, sabotage of technical equipment, then HOLY SHIT CIVIL WAR, FUCKEN TANKS, BATTLE HORSES then Mike Tyson spying through telescope, Seagal slapping his secretary’s arse, drive to phone tower to install transmitter HOLY SHIT THE LOCALS ARE KILLING A BABY GIRL RESCUE HER actually it was a circumcision and you’ve offended their faith and now IT guy has been strung up by his feet WE’RE TRAPPED IN A SANDSTORM... This is the strangest movie about telecommunications ever made.

The best performance in the film is from Dong-xue Li who tries his best with the material he’s given. He can at least act, with the exception of his fall from the radio tower which should take three seconds but takes twenty and is hilariously overdone. As for Seagal and Tyson’s remainder of the film (I know that’s why you are here); Tyson gets in on the action but mostly it’s driving a tank. No, it’s not as cool as it sounds. He does shoot missiles at a helicopter which IS cool, but misses. Christ he’s a bad actor, really. Not B-action star bad, just BAD. I’ve seen a less wooden performance from a tree. Seagal does a lot of what he does lots of these days - sitting in chairs. He is absent for the entire second act, but I’m sure he was sitting in a chair then too.

I spent a lot of this film with my mouth wide open just astonished at what I was seeing - not for good reasons mind you. The combination of what seems to be an absolutely huge budget with really quite beautiful sets and scenery, likely financed directly by the Chinese Government, contrasted with the quality of script and the bulk of the acting. They were so far apart I just couldn’t believe it. You know in a B-action movie the acting can be ropey and you accept it, but this is that kind of acting you get when both "non-English as a first language” speakers combine with "English as a first language but we better dumb it down for the Chinese audience” speakers butt heads. Top that off with the already suspect acting ability of Tyson and.. this is painful to watch. Scenes change gears so abruptly it feels like something was left on the cutting room floor. One moment Yan Jian is being arrested for drinking alcohol he thought was goats milk (yes, truly) and literally three seconds later Tyson ambushes the building and blows it half up, along with the people inside. Okay? Did that actually happen in this “true story”?

So, Scott Adkins (billed as Scotty Adkins) has executive producer credits on this mess? What the hell was he doing? I love the guy’s work (seriously, everybody go see Savage Dog right now) but he shouldn’t have put his name to this propaganda film. Maybe he just produced the epic fight between our poster hogs? I’ll let myself believe that.

Did I hate this movie then? No. It’s too ridiculous to hate and the opening fight is boss. If they shaved 30 minutes off it (this thing drags through 110 minutes), it could have been loads better. As it is, it’s more often than not unintentionally hilarious what with the bonkers scenes and remedial English. In the final act, Mike Tyson gives a heartfelt monologue complete with tears, but he’s doing that whilst holding detonators in his hand. And when he said “No more war, we must bring peeth” I completely lost it. For a far better Chinese production mixed with Western actors, check out Wolf Warrior 2.

China Salesman movie was written and directed by Tan Bing and it is his only credit on IMDB. I wouldn’t be surprised if it remained that way.

Addendum: it’s worth noting that about a quarter of the film’s runtime is in Mandarin with English subtitles.

Highlight:

As you can probably guess, the best and most traditional part of the film is the Seagal vs Tyson fight at the ten minute mark. It’s pretty epic actually, with Tyson throwing strong punches, Seagal throwing barrels and Tyson punching through them, half a bar being destroyed.. good times. Shame about the rest of the film.

Trailer:

Ultimate Justice (2016)

Tagline:

Vivere Militare Est.

Movie Review:

So I’ll get this out of the way early. The film is largely dubbed, in English, likely due to it surprisingly being a German film. Mostly by their original voices (this is no Steven Seagal in Attack Force); Mark plays Mark, Hues plays Hues, etc. But for example Wolfgang Riehm who plays the Commander is clearly speaking German and being dubbed by somebody else. I thought this was going to be intolerable, especially after an early scene had bad echoes of the actors possibly doing their ADR work in a large room but thankfully that passed and the dubbing became less noticeable as the film progressed, though the sound is rarely natural. I thank my years of watched Kung Fu movies for my tolerance level being higher than perhaps others.

We start with a pretty sweet two-squad attack on an enemy compound that sees Gus (Mark Dacascos) and Frank (Matthias Hues) taking point. Through the usual array of firing every variety of military firearm, hand grenades and even a tasty knife thrown at a throat the team get the “package” (some guy, I dunno, it’s irrelevant) but not first without losing a man. Back on friendly ground, Gus tells the Commander he’s done with this crap and disbands the team - in fact he sells the whole company (no that’s not weird, I just haven’t mentioned yet that this is a private special operations group - not regular army Joes).

Eight years later and Gus is having dinner with his former Commander Hans, his wife and daughter. Hans reveals he is sick and has been seeing a doctor. This seems like something important that we should remember but Gus’ wife is impatient for sex so they leave. That night Hans’ family is attacked at home; his wife raped and murdered (a rather nasty scene), and his daughter kidnapped. Calling in on Hans at the hospital, Gus declares he will get the old team back together, rescue Hans’ daughter and deliver... Ultimate Justice.

It’s the oldest action movie plot in existence, but I digress. This independent action flick has a lot to offer for seasoned DTV action movie fans. Firstly there are a lot of fights and shootouts and they get pretty creative, with interesting locations and set pieces that keep things interesting. Hand to hand combat is largely based around the martial arts, and at times echoes the best Jackie Chan films with the use of random objects as makeshift weapons against three guys at once finally culminating with a shovel to the face. The film goes from interrogation to fight, to interrogation to shootout, car chase to dirt bike chase, throw in a team casualty and a red herring, wash and repeat until the final showdown and rescue of the girl. Some of the old tropes come out of the closet (“I thought you were dead!”). This is no bad thing, by the way. You didn’t come here expecting anything else. 

“To live is to fight.”
“What does it mean to die?" 

All the fighters are believable and we get decent screen time fights for the main team of Mark Dacascos and Matthias Hues (and it’s great to see them as compadres, not enemies). My standout was Mike Möller as Benny who has some fast Van Dammage-like kicks in his arsenal. He’s certainly moved on from Inmate #1 in Half Past Dead and sports quite the filmography as an established stuntman. I hope to see him in more leading action roles, though not to downplay the quality fights that the rest of the team displayed, he was my favourite.

When Gus is getting the team back together, we get the classic scenes of seeing what the former members are up to now, last seen for me in Expendables 3. One is a cop doing street fights for cash on the side. Another is the token computer hacker who is recruited as the.. computer hacker. Benny is pumping petrol and defending young lady customers from interfering scum. Brandon Rhea as Doc has become a monk to atone for his past sins as a top notch interrogator. But Matthias Hues wins the show with his new career flipping burgers, wearing a burger hat. This is off the charts awesome, as you can see below. 

The film may not sound great with the dubbing but it looks pretty good. Proper lighting, decent camera’s, this is a film that had a modicum of budget and was filmed in scope. The camera doesn’t flick around too much during the fights, though it’s still shot quite frenetically. This is refreshing as many modern DTV films cheap out on the visuals, though we still do get the occasional CG muzzle shot and squib but I did not find it distracting.

So overall, this is a fine indie actioner that suffers a little from the (sometimes amusing) post-production voice work, but is largely redeemed by some really quite good action set pieces, a story that doesn’t try too hard to be challenging, and a quality team of combatants (some of the bad guys too are badass fighters) that know how to deliver a good kicking. Good times at 90 minutes and a solid DTV debut for newcomer director Martin Christopher Bode. 

Highlight:

Aside from Matthias Hues’ burger hat, the biggest character development is the internal turmoil we see with Doc as he switches from master interrogator to monk in dressing gown. He snaps and turns to the dark side when one of the team close to him is killed, and the film takes a temporary very dark turn into Hostel territory with Doc torturing a guy with a nail-gun and disc sander. To quote Han Solo, “They didn’t even ask me any questions..”.

Trailer:

More photos:

Fist 2 Fist (2011)

Tagline:

His greatest enemy lies in the shadows of his past.

Movie Review:

It’s not very often I do back-to-back reviews of the same actor. I’m not even sure I have done so before - let alone another film in the same franchise. I was so impressed with Jino Kang in Fist 2 Fist 2: Weapon of Choice that I decided to go backwards in the saga to the first film. The first thing worth mentioning is that, like the various Bloodfist sequels, Jino Kang plays an entirely different character than he does in Fist 2 Fist 2: Weapon of Choice. So don’t go in expecting character continuation (or in this case, formation) and treat it as a stand alone film.

After an opening monologue delivered by Kang’s character Ken, we are straight into the action. Ken and his associate are about to break in to a car chop shop with the goal of rescuing said associate’s brother who has been forced to labour there. Almost instantly we are witness to the quality, actual martial arts delivered by Jino Kang. In character as Ken, he quickly dispatches the thugs then with a quick flinch disarms the leader of his pistol. Fast moves, and a nice intro into the world of Jino Kang that sets him up as a guy that will do what’s right and will use his skills to enforce it.

Ken runs a youth centre for street kids as well as kids training in the martial arts. We are introduced to Jim, a street kid who after a failed attempt to rob Ken, agrees to join his centre and train. We get a few fun scenes of a training montage, which differs from the usual as Ken is not doing most of the training. He sends Jim off to various schools to learn different schools of fighting from Karate to Hapkido and MMA - which, from the special features on the disc, appear to be actual trainers and fighters, not actors. 

At the same time, incarcerated underworld boss Tokyo Joe (Bill Duff, featured on the poster) is up for parole. He has served fifteen years behind bars and blames his former criminal colleague Ken for his predicament; through a flashback it’s revealed that in a carjacking gone wrong, Joe snapped and killed the driver leaving a baby orphaned, and Ken has spent the same time trying to atone for what he did that night. Strangely the first thing Joe does when he gets out of jail is go see a psychic. That was a little odd, but whatever floats your boat.

You’d think the next course of action is for Joe to kill Ken, but no. They meet like men and Joe offers him a deal - his fighters versus Ken’s fighters in a battle royale, the winner takes the substantial pot and all past deeds forgotten. Ken can use the money to keep his youth centre open. “This sounds too good to be true” says Ken. Right he is. Ken’s wife begs Joe not to go ahead with the tournament and in return she is taken hostage to ensure the fight goes ahead. Ken, a man atoning for his past life and trying to make better choices, now must close the book on a story started fifteen years earlier.

“There’s always a choice. You just always make the wrong one."

The plot of Fist 2 Fist is similar to most other “forced to fight” films, but that’s not to say the films offers nothing new. The angle taken here is less on the fights in the ring themselves - they are the side story of Jim and his friends trying to keep their youth centre operating. The main focus is on Ken fighting his way through Tokyo Joe’s thugs to rescue his wife and defeat Joe in hand to hand (or fist 2 fist) combat. Each attacker he faces offers something unique for us to see defeated. One guy called Speed has Wolverine-style claws on his hands that scratch Ken up but still don’t take him out. Ken upgrades from his fists to knives and the violence gets bloodier with throats cut, a taser employed and a guy crushed by a car hydraulic. Ouch. 

The best things about Jino Kang’s films are their honesty. They are gritty and realistic. Low key, without the flamboyant pretence of bigger Hollywood films nor the wire work of modern Chinese epics. No outrageous special effects. He’s used the cameras and equipment needed to get the job done. There’s nothing about the fights in his films that don’t look achievable to somebody with skills. Jino Kang is not an ‘action hero’, he’s somebody that knows the arts and is applying them to movies that he writes, directs and stars in. Like I said in the quasi-sequel, they are clearly passion projects for him.

I bought this DVD on a whim a long time ago in a bulk sale and filed it on the shelf. It wasn’t until I learned who Jino Kang was that I realised I actually had a film with him in it. The cover: I wouldn’t say put me off, but with that title it didn’t encourage me to watch this expecting martial arts fun. More a WWE studios beatdown. Kang isn’t even on it, and I’m not familiar with Bill Duff’s career in wrestling to recognise his name. I should have watched this film sooner. And Kang should clearly be taking the front and centre position on the poster. Out of the three Jino Kang films I’ve seen (and that so far is all of them) this is my favourite one. Recommended.

Highlight:

In a eight-to-one match that would see lesser combatants taken out swiftly, Ken approaches it with a one-liner that sounds straight out of a Van Damme movie: “Which one of you mother fuckers wants to die first?” Ken pulverises the goons in a marvellous arm-breaking beatdown!

Movie: