Rumble has Gary Daniels as a former MMA champ whose girlfriend is into a pimp for money, so he needs to keep fighting to make the money back. While in Mexico for a fight, his girlfriend is kidnapped, and the man holding her is a mysterious cartel leader who forces Daniels to fight in order to get her back. Will Gary be able to figure out who is holding his girlfriend in time to save them both?
I'm not sure where to go with this one. This is meant to be a different kind of Gary Daniels movie, up to the point it isn't, and I think that identity crisis is its ultimate undoing. At times it's trying to be your traditional Daniels actioner, like when he's taking out three guys who are chasing him at once. But then you have non-Daniels elements, like how it tries to be this Hitchcockian-Usual Suspects suspense thriller, where we don't know who is after Daniels and what he ultimately wants, but we think it could be any of the people Daniels has been in contact with to this point. The biggest issue for me though was just how many times Daniels's character got his ass kicked. Like, at the end, when he wins a fight, I'm like "oh yeah, that's right, he can do that." Maybe that's the key complaint with this film: they spend so much time diminishing Daniels's abilities as a hero, that when he finally shows he can prevail, it actually stretches credulity.
Definitely not what we want from a Daniels action flick. There are times when his character is getting his ass kicked, and I'm like "I can't watch this happen." Daniels was the fight choreographer, and maybe that was the thing, he didn't want to choreograph wins for himself in all his fights, and I get that, but I also feel like he has to understand the reputation he's built with his fans. Cold Harvest, Recoil, Bloodmoon, among many others, showcased a top notch athlete with supreme skills, and while maybe that's not the movie that's being made here, or that Daniels wanted to choreograph for his character's role, there's a certain expectation when his name's on the marquee, and his fans want something that meets that expectation. Right away, we find out his character is on the run from a pimp. Gary Daniels is playing a character on the run from a pimp? The pimp and his henchmen are the intro fodder in a usual Daniels flick, he doesn't run from them, he warms up on them. I get that this movie is supposed to be viewed separate from the rest of Daniels's flicks, but there should also be an understanding of what expectations seeing Daniels's name on the box evokes from fans like me.
This was directed by R. Ellis Frazier, who did another Daniels flick we've reviewed here, Across the Line, and from what I've seen of his filmography, he does a lot of these DTV flicks shot in Mexico, many of which were written by this film's screenwriter, Benjamin Budd. This is one of those ones where I would've liked to have had it on DVD and been able to listen to their commentary, if they had it, to see what they were going for in certain spots, especially the unevenness in Daniels character between when he couldn't take down anyone, and when he could beat up the same guys who were kicking his ass earlier. I get why they would cast Daniels in this role, because he could fight, so playing an MMA champion wouldn't be much of a stretch; but going from having him take down three fake police officers at once, then not being able to beat up a pimp's hatchet man, made it hard to understand what his character's abilities were, especially when we're used to Daniels being more of the former than the latter. There are a bunch of other Ellis/Budd collaborations listed on imdb, including two on my radar, Misfire with Daniels, and Larceny with Dolph Lundgren. It'll be interesting to see how either of those go.
Getting back to Daniels, this is his 44th tag here, putting him behind only Dolph Lundgren's 49 (one of which was for the Van Damme Film Fest on the 400th post); and with Albert Pyun's 41, puts him in exclusive company in the 40+ club. He's been a workhorse for just over three decades, giving us such classics as Bloodmoon, Cold Harvest, and Recoil, and while he also does a lot of small parts in films with bigger stars, he's carried enough as the lead that I think he's put in his work. I also think too that he's earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to a movie like this that may have been too ambitious and missed its mark for me. With 40+ and counting, we still have a ways to go to get caught up on the rest of his films, so it'll be interesting to see how some of those went as well.
The Hitchcockian element was something that, at least I appreciated the effort on, but by the same token, it begs the question: who are you making this film for? Most film fans picking this up when they see Gary Daniels on the tin want this badass here. Maybe the better Hitchcockian thriller would have been him losing his girlfriend under mysterious circumstances, but he needs to find out what happened by investigating, as opposed to getting his ass kicked for two-thirds of the film. Goes to a bar to interrogate people, bar fight ensues, bar's destroyed, but Daniels gets his answers. Goes to an outdoor market, chase, then fight ensues, local business people eking out a meager existence have their products destroyed, but Daniels gets his answers. See where this is going? There's a right way and a wrong way to make a good Gary Daniels film, and it doesn't have to be the in-your-face mile-a-minute action of a PM Entertainment flick either. Us action fans don't ask for much, but if you give us what we want, we're loyal and grateful.
And on that note, time to wrap this up. The bonus here is it is Daniels-centric, and he has some good fights which he himself choreographed. But I think it's hard to split the baby with what this was going for, and the fact that Daniels's character got his ass kicked so much it made it tough to watch in spots. I don't think this touches his best stuff, but I do appreciate that this wasn't one of his others where he's taking a backseat to other actors, and hopefully we'll at least get more of him in this capacity.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3991302
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