Kickboxer 3: The Art of War (1992)
Trades Martial Violence for Mindless Gore
It's not fair to call Kickboxer 3: The Art of War a bad movie, even it is by most measures a very bad movie. It's not meant to be a good movie. It's meant to show off a little kickboxing and a little raw physicality, spiced up with moral justice vigilante style, and fully enhanced with lots and lots of dead people.
At first we are on the side of this seemingly peaceable, obviously buff athlete of a dude visiting Rio. He presents himself as above the cheap tricks and meanness of his rough Third World hosts. But when it comes to beating the Third World thugs and their nasty ring of enslaved sex girls, he gets down and dirty--not with kicks and strategy, but with lots of guns, and good old shoot-em-up gore. It's awful, and not very well sequenced. Even a movie like this could give a sense that he would, in fact, not get shot at dozen times first. But he has the protective halo of bad directing by Rick King.
Sasha Mitchell as the Kickboxer is what you expect. Though showing no acting genius, it's not his fault the movie struggles around him. How do all these people take such sensational raw material and make it actually a bore? Ha.
Trades Martial Violence for Mindless Gore
It's not fair to call Kickboxer 3: The Art of War a bad movie, even it is by most measures a very bad movie. It's not meant to be a good movie. It's meant to show off a little kickboxing and a little raw physicality, spiced up with moral justice vigilante style, and fully enhanced with lots and lots of dead people.
At first we are on the side of this seemingly peaceable, obviously buff athlete of a dude visiting Rio. He presents himself as above the cheap tricks and meanness of his rough Third World hosts. But when it comes to beating the Third World thugs and their nasty ring of enslaved sex girls, he gets down and dirty--not with kicks and strategy, but with lots of guns, and good old shoot-em-up gore. It's awful, and not very well sequenced. Even a movie like this could give a sense that he would, in fact, not get shot at dozen times first. But he has the protective halo of bad directing by Rick King.
Sasha Mitchell as the Kickboxer is what you expect. Though showing no acting genius, it's not his fault the movie struggles around him. How do all these people take such sensational raw material and make it actually a bore? Ha.