Female Fight Club (2016)

This film is a milestone on here for two reasons. One, it officially marks Dolph's entry into the 60 Club. I don't know if I'll create any imaging for that until Gary Daniels finally joins him in a year or two, but we'll see; and two, this is the last DTV film of Dolph's I needed to see, and now I've seen them all. (There are three more Dolph's I need to see though: Small Apartments, Fat Slags, and Electric Boogaloo.)

Female Fight Club has Amy Johnston as a woman working at an animal shelter in Vegas who has a past... turns out she was once an underground pit fighter, but she quit after her sister (Tracy Palm) was assaulted by someone and her father (Dolph Lundgren) killed that someone. The sister is also a fighter, and she has a daughter of her own to support. When she gets in big to a crime boss running an underground fight ring, she enlists her sister to help train some female fighters she's been working with, so they can win a tournament and she can make good with the crime boss. But, as we know in movies like this, pasts don't go away that easily, and who's casting Amy Johnston in a movie like this if she isn't going to fight eventually?

 

This wasn't horrible, but it does miss a few marks. First and foremost, there isn't much of a female fight club. Johnston trains them for a second, then a few scenes later they get beaten in the tournament, and that's the end of it. Also, not to give it away, but they kill off a character that they didn't need to kill off, as it doesn't advance the plot in any way, so it just felt like they were trying to be dark to be dark, or dramatic to be dramatic. On the other hand, there are some good fights in this, in particular a nice Dolph one just so we feel like we got our money's worth out of seeing his name on the tin, and Johnston feels like someone who could be in that next generation of DTV action stars if she gets the right vehicles. Maybe this isn't the right vehicle for her, but she at least showed she could handle something better. Overall, this isn't the worst thing to watch if you find it on your streaming package.

60 movies for the great Dolph Lundgren, the Babe Ruth of DTV. I finally made a trip up to see a game at Yankee Stadium a couple weeks ago, and made sure I got my pics of the Babe Ruth's granite monument and retired number at Monument Park, and his jerseys in the Yankees Museum; and my grandfather actually saw Ruth play in his 1935 season with the Boston Braves. The point I'm getting to is, maybe I'm pumping Dolph up too much by comparing him to perhaps the greatest player in baseball history, but everyone knows I love baseball analogies, and who else would Dolph be if not Babe Ruth? And 60's a big number for Ruth, as that was the single-season home run record he held until Maris broke it with 61--and we even have our asterisk, because technically Dolph has been tagged 61 times, but we don't count the time he was tagged for the Van Damme Film Fest post. There's never been a DTV star who's moved the needle the way Dolph has--maybe Seagal, but he doesn't have as many DTV films. By my count, we have six or seven Dolph's left to review, plus he has some in post-production that haven't been released yet, so the 70 Club isn't that far fetched. If it's a Dolph movie, we'll be there.

 

This is definitely more an Amy Johnston movie than a Dolph movie, and while Dolph is the reason we're here, Johnston is developing a name where she can be the main draw without a Dolph alongside. I also liked that Dolph in this, like he did with Natalie Burn in Acceleration, and Denise Richards in Altitude, took a step back to let a woman making a name for herself in DTV action have the spotlight. The thing is, this movie couldn't tell if it wanted to be a dramatic, suspenseful slow-burner, or an action-packed punchfighter, and for someone like Johnston who's making a name for herself, that doesn't help. I think she needs a full-on, 85-minute, Adkins-style actioner where her character is allowed to just get after it. Maybe a Debt Collector sequel where it's her and Natalie Burn beating up guys and collecting debts. Speaking of Adkins, we've seen her once before in Accident Man, and she was great there in a smaller supporting part; but looking at her IMDb bio, I don't see much more of her stuff for us to do, beyond Lady Bloodfight and Breaking Barbi. Hopefully this is just the start of a big DTV career for her.

As I mentioned above, there isn't much of a Female Fight Club in this film, which isn't good since that's the name of the movie. It ended up feeling like an underdeveloped aspect, but by the same token, the women in the female fight club weren't as compelling Johnston's character, so I get why they weren't developed further. It makes the movie feel uneven though, to have this whole thing of her training fighters midway through the movie, and then it's abandoned. This ends up feeling like the issue we've been seeing with a lot of DTV movies lately: they have enough material for an episode of a syndicated action show, but not enough to fill a 90-minute movie. I don't know why this problem has become so prevalent, but it feels like something that we've been seeing a lot of since 2011. Is it because there is no more syndicated action TV for screenwriters to get work on, so they're just taking scripts they would have written for that and adding 45 minutes of pages? Maybe the number of streaming services looking for content could be a new avenue for syndicated TV--I saw that there's a From Dusk Til Dawn TV show that probably would have been a syndicated TV show in the 90s. Hopefully that kind of thing will fill the gap, and eventually our DTV movies will start to feel like movies again, and not TV show episodes with a bunch of fluff tacked on.

 

Finally, I feel like Dolph's 60th film on the site deserves another paragraph, so here we are. Dolph is about five or six years older than Mark Dacascos, but the point is the same that, like Dacascos did in One Night in Bangkok, he's leaning into playing an older part here, which is refreshing. He's not playing someone older than himself the way Dacascos did, but he is playing someone his age, who has two grown daughters, one of whom has a daughter of her own, making his character a grandfather. We have a whole collection of films available on Tubi and other streaming services where we can revisit Dolph's career when he was younger if we really need that. There are also some films we haven't reviewed yet where he plays someone younger--or gets the younger female costar--and I think we'll be able to go back to this one when we look at those and say, this is a much better way to do it. With Dolph and Van Damme in their 60s, and Seagal approaching 70, we're seeing a new age with action stars staying relevant longer, and I think how they play these parts is uncharted territory that DTV filmmakers are going to have to navigate, along with the stars themselves in how their characters are portrayed. Doing it this way, where Dolph is playing someone his own age and isn't as much in the spotlight so a new star like Johnston can shine, is one avenue that I think can really work.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of right now, I don't think this is available on any of the main streaming platforms--IMDb lists it as on the Tribeca Shortlist Prime Channel, but the best I can tell it's a $4 streaming rental here in the States. For my money, it's not worth that--I was able to get it as part of another streaming service's free preview week through our cable provider, and if you get an opportunity like that, I'd say it's worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5153860/

And if you haven't yet, check out my novel, Chad in Accounting, in paperback or on Kindle!

One Night in Bangkok (2020)

I saw this was available on HBO Max, and with us needing to get more from newly inducted Hall of Famer Mark Dacascos on the site, it seemed like a perfect match. By the same token, every time I see the title, I get the Murray Head song of the same name stuck in my dome. I haven't had it this bad since Mike Nelson sang the chorus while he and the 'bots were riffing on Alien from LA. Anyway, in addition to us, our friend Cam Sully reviewed this at Action Elite, Matt Spector covered it on Bulletproof Action, and it was done on Roger Ebert's site, so you can go to those places to see what they thought.

One Night in Bangkok is a remake of Collateral, with Dacascos as Kai, a Hawaiian hit man out for revenge. He gets picked up by a ride share driver, and tells her he'll give her six grand if she drives him around for the evening. With a sick brother, this sounds like a great deal for her, until each stop leaves Dacascos more bruised and bloody, making her wonder what he's up to and if this is a good idea. The thing is though, once you let Dacascos in, it's hard to quit him--we've all learned that over time.

 

Where do I go with this one? It's more of a slow burner, which isn't always a bad thing. Also, I was a fan of Dacascos taking on a role that was more than just mean-mugging and beating people up--though I love seeing him do that too. He takes the scene I took a screen of above, where he's just sitting outside the airport waiting for his ride, and makes it something I want to watch, which is not always easy to do. On the other hand, the runtime was a bit long; the director, Kaos, used a split screen effect at times that I felt was distracting and gimmicky; and the dialog left a little to be desired, which, when you're working on a slow-burner, it needs to be better since it's propping up the film more. In fact, there was a lot of non-speaking chemistry between Dacascos and the driver, played by Vanida Golten, and I felt like some of the scenes of them in the car together could have been better without dialog, especially with the great shots of Bangkok at night mixed in. Overall though, I liked this different take on Collateral, and the attempt to go outside the usual tone and style of an action movie, especially with how Dacascos took this part and really went for it.

This is not the first time Dacascos has played a more emotionally complex hit man, and one fun similarity that this film has to Crying Freeman, is Dacascos's wife, Julie Condra, whom he met on the set of that earlier movie, is in this as well--I won't give it away, but just mention she's in this and leave it at that. Again, I can't give away too much of what the movie's about in order to keep it fresh for you if you do decide to see it, which hampers my ability to go too far into why I liked Dacascos's performance, but the coolest part for me is that he's playing someone ten years older than him. We're so used to these aging action stars playing someone younger--Van Damme's character wasn't born in 1960, he was born in 1970; or Seagal playing a 60-year-old active duty soldier--for Dacascos to say "no, make me ten years older; make me a grandfather; don't give me the love scenes with the younger actress," to me is not only refreshing, but shows who he is as a professional. And the dialog issues I mentioned aside, I think he hits this out of the park, which makes it all the better.

 

This is the second Kaos-directed film we've done here at the DTVC, the other being Zero Tolerance with Adkins and Daniels. This one works better, but it has a similar narrative to the other film, so perhaps Kaos has a thing for fathers going on killing sprees for their daughters kinds of story lines. For me, what made this more, was how he made Bangkok a character in the way a Scorsese makes New York City a character. We're so used to Western directors making films in Asia and projecting this "mystery of the Orient" tone that's steeped in Western Imperialism--and to some extent, this is done in a lot of DTV films because the movies are made on the cheap and the studios want every cliche checked off to keep us Western audiences happy. In a way, even the title is a play on that tradition, because nothing typifies that more than the song that the film shares its name with. This is not to say we need to "cancel" all the DTV flicks shot in Asia that traffic in these stereotypes, rather, it's just another thing for us to recognize along with the boom mics and other gaffs we catch as we're watching them.

Kane Kosugi has a really small part in this, despite his name being on the cover. The thing is though, he was a really cool character, so it's kind of too bad he wasn't in it more. I think the issue is, as I watched the movie, I don't know how would Kaos have fit him in. One thing I noticed, is in the IMDb synopsis, and the Roger Ebert site review, Kosugi is incorrectly listed as the cop chasing Dacascos down--and the Ebert reviewer actually calls him "Shane Kosugi," so I wanted to clear that up for anyone who gets confused when they watch this. Another performance I liked in this was Prinya Intachai, who is actually the one who plays the cop chasing Dacascos. He brought a New York sensibility to the proceedings that I thought added a lot of flavor in away that hearkened back to an old hard-boiled NYC detective tradition.

 

Finally, one thing I liked about Dacascos's character was, not only was he Hawaiian, but it was brought up in the film specifically that he was Hawaiian. It's one thing for a movie or TV show that takes place in Hawaii to have Dacascos playing a Hawaiian, but here he was representing Hawaii in Thailand, which I know as a proud Hawaiian he must've appreciated. I also think it helped Kaos in his attempt to divorce this film from the constraints of Western Imperialism, as we're used to seeing the American or European go into Asia and beat up and/or kill a bunch of local baddies and save the girl. By having Dacascos say he's "Hawaiian", he's no longer the ugly American or representing the idea of American exceptionalism against Asia that he would've been if he'd said he was "American." 

All right, it's time to wrap this up. This is still available on HBO Max, and if you have it, I think it's worth checking out. It is a little long, the dialog is a little off, and I could have done without the split screen effect; but overall I liked what Kaos was going for here, and I liked how Dacascos took a part that stretched him as an actor and hit it out of the park.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12192190

And if you haven't yet, check out my novel, Chad in Accounting, in paperback or on Kindle!