Action Hero MoviesFirst impressions show potential, but there’s some terrible acting and terrible music — it’s like one big pop/trash music parade. Hopefully it’ll get better when the plot thickens.
By the half way mark, it’s clear this movie is put together to instil a particular kind of insecure discombobulated dysfunctional reckless-yet-sheepish emo attitude upon a mostly juvenile audience. The characters are unconvincing as martial artists, and they’re below average as actors in general. The music is of terribly taste. The script is half intriguing though. It oozes a cheap TV drama feel. Aside from a short appearance in the first 10 minutes, we don’t see Jackie Chan again until the second half of the movie, from around 50 minutes in, at which point the movie takes a turn for the better. Jackie Chan is an extremely old man here — only semi recognisable. Before the first hour is out, Ralph Macchio also appears. Talk about a wasted first half of the movie, and an unexpected significant uplift for the last half hour.
I’m going to rate this movie Below Average, although by half an hour in it was almost certain to be set for an even lower rating than that. Everyone needs sacking except Jackie and Macchio — the other actors and the whole crew behind the scenes need replacing. This movie represents a cool concept, poorly executed.
The star of the movie is Ben Wang, playing Li ‘Stuffed Crust’ Fong. As you can tell, it’s a less serious movie than Ralph Macchio’s original Karate Kid trilogy, or the one Jackie Chan made with Jaden Smith. It’s almost a parody like the recent series Ralph Macchio was involved in. Ben Wang’s character doesn’t come across as an action hero we can get behind — he comes across as an apologetic bed wetter. He’s not a leader, he’s a follower — he’s the complete wrong end of the spectrum for this kind of role. His demeanour is all wrong, but that’s probably the intention of the producers. He’s clearly not a serious martial artist in real life — a stuntman is probably doing all his acrobatic moves. Having said that, he’s got far better structure than Ralph Macchio who literally couldn’t be any worse thus has clearly never really done any karate in his life even though he made his name off it many decades ago.
Semi-reasonable semi-weak tournament scenes at the end. Semi-funny parody-style banter at the very end as we meet another old character from Cobra Kai in William Zabka.