Kung Fu Games

Kung-Fu-Games
Kung Fu Games

The trailer for Kung Fu Games ends with the note that one of the executive producers is from Halloween: Resurrection. For those who have forgotten, that is the one with the rapper Busta Rhymes who pummels Michael Myers. Surely the reminder that a connection with that film was something to be proud of should have been enough of a warning.

However, I was treated with a different experience since I had to watch a bunch of bewildered individuals waking up in what appears to be a moving train of a subway while wailing lights and sirens go off. A door opens into what appears to be a bamboo forest engulfed in mist, where one of them gets stabbed with a spear, and the others are ambushed by fighters that drop from the sky.

While Graham Gunner (Jose Manuel, The Fist of the Condor, Dispatched), the “cancelled” Hollywood action star, Fisher, ex-soldier played by Mark Strange aka Mike Fischer (Hounds of War, Avengement), and Sarah Ludlow (Caitlin Dechelle, Chinese Zodiac, Teen Wolf), who previously killed someone in the ring as an MMA fighter, do form a group, we learn two other characters have also been rounded up and taken into that room. Maly (Jade Xu, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Black Widow) and Alex (Miguel Peralta, Seized, Shadow Fist 3: The Final Chapter) complete the ensemble cast.

Kung Fu Games is the last, the fourth, punch in the last line of recent four martial arts films produced by Tiger Style Media. One more of them The Lockdown which was directed by Ryan C Jaeger and one more written by producer H. Daniel Gross who also co-wrote Art of Eight Limbs and I know, who is probably responsible now, since, in addition to Sasha Schneider, who wrote the previous girl power 70’s sexploitation classic, has also written the fourth film, The Lady Scorpions.

We know that the fighters have been captured and forced to fight to the death for the enjoyment of billionaire Calvin Prince played by Lathrop Walker in the movie The Penitent Man. He has called upon his old friend Eric played by Matt Goodwin who starred in The Treasure of Painted Forest and Rocktards to assist him in converting this proof of concept into a permanent, narrowly defined, deadly reality TV series. In other words, it is a more sophisticated version of The Lockdown’s tokusatsu genre, not to mention the entire number of other motion pictures that have exploited it.

The fights have been designed to fit in the characters of martial arts movies, one such place is described as looking like the set of a Shaw Brothers film even before the audience witnesses the pole-battling stuntmen. Another one is a reimagining of the subway brawl scene in The Raid 2 complete with hammers as power-ups. The trouble is that no matter how grand the set piece action that is choreographed, it will never stand out from the actual film.

And yes, that is the case here. The fight scenes are quite good, stunt coordinator Sarah Chang (The Trigonal: Fight for Justice, Mon Mon Mon Monsters) does not restrict himself to hand-to-hand combat but also quite a bit of the work of fighting with weapons. Staffs, swords, nunchucks, and as I mentioned hammers, all see action here which is a nice change of pace. But good is not good enough when one is trying to bring back memories of classics and again, the fights in this film, so far the best in any of the Tiger Style Media quartet, aren’t something treating to watch either in comparison with the classics.

For most of the film, the action scenes combine with the highly derivative and predictable plot which is quick to die down giving us the best performing Kung Fu Games of the batch. Not that, this is all that great. Unfortunately, it severely misses out on the last chapters and ends up on a very poor note. If one is in the mood to watch a martial arts film, this is still doable, but preferably if it is watched on Tubi or something similar.

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