Holy moly, what a piece of shit...
Nonlinear editing made it even worse than it should have been. Film was lit dark as fuck 100% of the time for no reason. Had that cheap digital look to it as well, the whole way through.
Really substandard performances from the star, GSP and Carano. I don't really blame GSP all that much though, his lines were awful and his scenes required nonverbal stuff that he shouldn't have been asked to do at this point.
Surprisingly passable performance from the protagonist's brother, the guy that gets killed at the start. He was all right in his scenes, and stole them from the star and Carano.
Bautista was decent. He always does a passable to good job. His combat knowledge came in handy and he isn't bad with speaking parts.
Van Damme... Passable. One of his lesser performances from recent years, and I've seen much better from him since he actually became a good actor about 10 years ago. And why was he wearing sunglasses the entire time? It just made it even harder to relate with his character. Had he just had an eyelift or something?
Some scenes were done well, like Tong Po breaking that concrete pillar (CGI cracks in the cement aside). It effectively set up Tong Po as a wrecking machine. Some were executed ridiculously, like that neverending fight sequence they tried to pass off as happening on top of elephants.
The writing was brutal. A Thai guy referencing scenes from the Godfather? Shit man, don't remind me of the fucking Godfather while you're making me watch Kickboxer: Vengeance. Just rambling bullshit. And then he was so over the top when announcing the final fight that he seemed to be channeling Travolta from Battlefield Earth. Still, even if it was bad, at least he brought a bit of personality to his role, unlike almost everyone else.
Love story was a joke. They go from barely knowing each other to having sex spliced in with the training montage?
I thought the original Kickboxer was quite overrated as far as 80s action "classics" go, but this movie made me long for that movie, which I didn't even like very much.
I also think John Stockwell knows too much about acting to accept some of the deliveries I saw in this movie as the final cut.
