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Kickboxer: Retaliation

The Kickboxer reboot that came out a couple of years ago was not very good at all.  It wasn’t even a fun little thing that you could dig on for 90 mins and then forget about.  It had too much to live up to and fell horribly short in more ways than one.

So I wasn’t holding out a ton of hope for Retaliation.  In retrospect making two films back to back probably wasn’t the best idea.  When you do that you leave little, if any, time to regroup, correct mistakes or change direction from the first one if need be.  The filmmakers had a tremendous amount of faith in the series from conception.  So much faith that they were sure it was gonna be big enough to warrant at least one sequel, so they must’ve figured why not make that too while we’re at it?  It’s a given, right?

Well unfortunately Retaliation doesn’t stack up.  I had read that this was a significant improvement over Vengeance but to me this is the same or, at best, only a teeny bit better.  The plot is similarly generic involving a rich underground fight promoter (Christopher Lambert (Mortal Kombat)) kidnapping Kurt Sloane (Alain Moussi (stunts: Pacific Rim, The Smurfs 2)), transporting him back to Thailand and throwing him in jail until he agrees to have another fight to the death.

Van Damme returns as Sloane’s trainer who’s been blinded by Lambert as revenge for coaching Sloane which led to the death of Vengeance’s villain Tong Po, I think.  Whatever, it doesn’t make a difference because Van Damme knows everything that everyone is saying and doing anyway and can follow a fight purely by sound.  If there wasn’t going to be some disadvantage, any disadvantage, to losing this guy’s sight then why do it?  Literally nothing’s different.

Actually, I found the entire picture to be a strange experience because it’s very straight forward yet it’s not.  For example the thing opens with a long action sequence on a train where Sloane is dressed in a fancy suit and fights a bunch of bad guys through multiple cars and on the roof and so on.  I genuinely thought I was watching the wrong movie for a little while.  Then I realized it was a dream but why is this in here?  It has no bearing on anything.  Like at one point Sloane manages to break free from Lambert to search for his wife who’s also been kidnapped and being held hostage but soon after he gets caught so the escape amounts to nothing.  Mike Tyson (Ip Man 3, boxing shit) is in the same prison with Sloane and helps with the training even though we have Van Damme.  Tyson doesn’t seem to teach Kurt a move or technique that clearly helps him in his big showdown.  Speaking of which, the final fight lasts over twenty goddamn minutes with both men taking superhuman levels of beatings.  It gets kinda boring.  This is all weird shit that wasn’t thought out.

Apparently they’re still trying to get a third installment made.  I think they should tap out.  These are two mediocre films that keep tricking people like me into watching them because they bear the Kickboxer name.  Ok fine, Van Damme is a legit draw but his character is so infallible and he plays it so laid back that it’s annoying.  The whole undertaking is tedious.  I said it in my Vengeance review and I’ll say it again here, just watch the original Van Damme version.  It’s still really fuckin’ good.