An American action film directed by Corey Yuen, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.
A boy's father and karate trainer is defeated by mobsters looking to enslave all karate schools. The boy trains and defeats the mobster's best fighter.
Dumb, stale, stupid... This was like America's answer to China's shitty kung fu flicks. It came complete with distorted audio. The only thing in the soundtrack that sounded good was when there were electric guitars in the songs. A little bit of hard rock grit turned into heavy metal super-saturation. I didn't care about the plot or characters. R. J.'s rap song was absolutely pitiful, but his break dancing was good. I'm rating this bad for being just plain not worth watching. Seriously, skip it.
A Chinese kung fu romantic comedy directed by Sammo Hung and Corey Yuen, starring Jackie Chan.
A lawyer is working on a court case involving a woman who owns a fish farm that is being polluted by a nearby factory. The lawyer calls in 2 friends and they try to distract the women with romance.
It seems like this was trying to be everything and ended up as nothing. The hour and a half duration seemed long, mostly because I'm having a really crappy day when everything is problems. The plot was a little too convoluted for a kung fu flick and full of cliches from the genre, location and time. The characters did not impress me, except Mr. No Eyebrows at the end (image). He's the only non-Asian in the entire film! I think that much of the verbal humor was lost in translation during the absolutely horrid dubbing process. Physical humor remained and the team of Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan do a great job at that. The sets and costumes looked professional. Camera-work and editing looked textbook-perfect like Home Alone (1990). However, that does not include creativity or surprise. It was all very predictable and straight forward. There was just enough kung fu to classify it in the genre, but romance took priority over fighting. What fighting there was looked very much like the style of the 2 main stars, for obvious reasons. As I mentioned before, the dub was bad, but the audio quality was not. The dialogue was a little low in some sections and the kung foley was a little loud, but not annoyingly so. IMDB has this at 7.3/10, AllMovie rates it 1.5/5 AllMovie rating and 4/5 user ratings and Rotten Tomatoes has a 79% audience score. 65.5% is so close to getting an F that it can feel F's breath on the back of its neck. I agree with this average. Wikipedia says that this sucked because the actors played out of character to the point that a woman poisoned herself at the film production company's office. It's not worth poisoning oneself over a crappy movie though. I rate this poor. You probably should not watch it.
A Chinese comedy directed by Jeffrey Lau and Corey Yuen, starring Stephen Chow, Ng Man-tat, Sharla Cheung and Sandra Ng.
A young man with supernatural powers goes to stay with his gambler uncle. The uncle finds out that his nephew can see through solid items and uses him to win at gambling.
This was actually funny. The hour 40 duration went by quickly as I was laughing at Stephen Chow's jokes. The simplistic premise had a romantic sub-plot, but didn't really seem to matter much to me. It was more of a framework to hang humor on than a real story. The characters were a little shallow, but the nephew-uncle team made me laugh a few times. I can't say much for dialogue because of the language barrier, but the acting was great. I thought the funniest acting joke was when the uncle shows his nephew a movie about a gambler and there is a slow motion scene of the gambler entering a room. The nephew then does his own slow motion effect by walking slowly when he goes to meet a mob boss gambler. Sets and costumes were pretty standard for the area and time, nothing really worth mentioning. The armpit scene was not funny. Camera-work was standard as well. Not bad, I could see everything clearly, but nothing caught my eye as being above average. The dialogue on the version that I watched was dubbed into Thai. So it was a Chinese film, Thai dubbing with English subtitles. The soundtrack was everything cheesy that I like about late '80s early '90s film score music. Very dated and hokey, but in a good way for a comedy flick. This has a 6.9/10 on IMDB, 78% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for 2 awards. That seems about right to me. I rate it adequate for being a mediocre movie with some funny humor.
Action films directed by Louis Leterrier, Corey Yuen and Olivier Megaton, starring Jason Stratham.A professional driver gets jobs of delivering packages under dangerous conditions.This is standard procedure for new action films. The man's vehicle could be called a character due to the amount of screen-time it gets. There's more violence and camera-work than necessary, but there are some good parts. In the first film, the hero gets in a fight in a garage. He spills oil all over the floor and then breaks clipped pedals off a bicycle so that he can walk on the slick surface as his enemies fall. In the third film, he has to stay close to his car or the bracelet he is wearing will explode. He steals a BMX bicycle from a person on the street and proceeds to hop up cars and through a factory with it. I could tell there was wire-work involved in some parts of the series, but I couldn't identify how much was used in the BMX scene. Those few cool parts save this series from getting a bad rating. It's getting o.k.
