Let's be realistic.

An Exercise In Nonsense

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Now I'm not gonna give a breakdown of the plot as it's already been done by a few other reviewers. The story has potential, but Andre Lima, nor any of the other people in this movie should have been in it. The acting is down right awful. I think that this movie's acting quality and production value would make a production of Break the Barriers doing "Romeo and Juliet" look like the 90's blockbuster the "Titanic". Andre Lima is a great martial artist, but after seeing this movie it's like he crapped his pants on camera. As much as I respected him before now when I think of him, it's gonna be this... this horrible thing that crawled from the pits of Hades. The choreography was just blatantly ridiculous. Every single time I've seen someone try one those spinning leap kicks in a real fight thats not TKD they get their face/groin/leg/foot broken. I've also seen better shots taken in the Power Rangers. Please, do yourself a favor, this movie is just bad. Don't buy it, don't rent it, don't even look at it in the store. Just keep walking. It's not even so bad it's funny. It's just bad. If they cut the acting out of it and just showed the gym scenes and clips from the fight scenes and add some decent music. Lima TKD advertisement.

Too much fake touchy feely stuff including lots of lame flashback scenes, horrible acting (Lima and the son are just pathetic) a plot that is boring, predictable and all around lame, terrible weak score accompanied by bad 80's music that wants to be "the eye of the tiger" and if you get through all of that you'll be rewarded with a horrible final fight scene. If you love fight scenes where a guy lands a big blow to his opponent and then turns his back on him so that he can begin showboating to the crowd while the other guy is getting up and preparing to jump in with his own big blow...Then you'll love the end of this movie. I was hoping that the final battle would make up for the rest of this bad movie, but it was the worst scene of all. They threw a mat on the floor of some dark room put up a work light and started filming. The set looks pathetic, there's a pallet leaning against one wall, a mop bucket visible against another, cardboard boxes laying on the floor...why? To make the scene seem more "underground"? If you have any event where the two participants take away $350,000 your gonna make the place look snazzy and not leave junk like that laying around. Let's just say that the final "set" was horrible and leave it at that. Watching the crowd of spectators keep showing up in this poorly edited finally made me question one thing... Where are they in this scene? I'm not sure they were actually in the same room, from the way the scene is shot it seems that nobody was close enough to the "stage" (mat) to even see the fight. And the fight... Just horrible, It's obvious that "Zulu" isn't even trying, look at his legs in any scene where he's on the ground and you can see that he's not struggling, he's not even moving. And in the end Lima turns his back on Zulu...WHY? Why would a trained fighter do that? This movie is just junk, don't bother.

Non-actor Andre Lima stars in a story that mirrors his own story as a fighter who has to return to the ring when his daughter develops a brain tumor and he has get the money some how.The non-acting and unimaginative direction (its as rudimentary as you can imagine) kills this film pretty quickly.Its simply too difficult to pay any attention to the non-performances. I know its wrong to criticize people who aren't actors but normally the director can work with an actor to get a performance but here its clear the director either didn't care or wasn't able to try and make the performances into something workable. The only one giving anything like a real performance is Martin Kove as Lima's friend. To be certain it won't kill you if you run across it but its not something to seek out.

This film was a waste of time, acting was poor story line poor, made no sense whatsoever to why they made this film as it had no point. Why did he fight? They could have just made the film in 5 minutes, out of shape fighter's daughter gets sick, insurance won't pay as she is under 18, he starts training and fights underground to get some quick cash to pay for her, he loses, his dad gets money from lawyers as they fight with insurance. WOWOWOWOW amazing... thanks for wasting my time.The whole point of watching films like these is to get somewhere, the hero kicks ass and wins or dies after kicking ass. This has no story whatsoever and no point.The worst part of this film was the final fight, fight start he get's smacked then he starts to kick ass and as the other fighter is on the floor he turns his back on him and starts to cheer doing so leaves him open and ZULU the other fighter knocks him down with 1 final punch... common... who the hell would do that, if you are a champion black belt and have 3 black belts in 3 different fighting styles you get told never to lose eye contact with your adversary.You wanna see a kick ass film go watch anything that has Tony Jaa or Jet Li:):) 1 star is generous, I would give it a -minus rating if I could.