Diablo has Adkins as a mysterious figure who has snuck into Colombia to kidnap the teenage daughter (Alanna De La Rossa) of a major crime lord (Lucho Velasco). Despite how altruistic his motives might be, said crime lord puts out a bounty to get his daughter back. When one of the crime lord's henchman calls in Marko Zaror to get the girl back, all bets are off. Zaror's character is a psychopath with a metal hand and an immense amount of martial arts skills. Now he and Adkins are on a collision course to wackiness, and it's going to take everything they've got for either of them to prevail.
How many times do we see two names on the tin like Adkins and Zaror, and it delivers? And had this simply delivered it would've been great, and we'd have taken that and run. But this doesn't just deliver, these two guys give us multiple next-level fight scenes. It feels like for both of them, it's not about which of their characters gets to win, they see winning as delivering the best fight scenes together they possibly can, and as a result, we end up winning too. And as the As Seen on TV guys say, "we're not stopping there," because in addition to that, each star has their own number of fantastic solo scenes with stunt players who are all committed to making the best action movie they possibly can. This is what we as action fans are looking for, and what we often don't get anymore in the modern DTV space, but this is one of the few modern ones that I'd take the Pepsi Challenge with against the best of the Golden Age between the mid-80s and mid-90s, I thought it was that good.
We'll start as we usually do with our film's Hall of Famer, in this case Scott Adkins. This is his 33rd film we've reviewed, and I'd say after Avengement this is his second best (I liked The Expendables 2 better than this as well, but as an Adkins film I'd put this above it). I was going through movies of the 2000s to make a favorite DTV films of the 2000s list on Letterboxd, and it feels like a lot of them are Adkins films. Candidates like Ninja II, Savage Dog (which also has Zaror), Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, Accident Man, the One Shots, it's ridiculous how much great stuff he's done over the past 25 years or so. To then say that this is the second-best among those gives you a sense of what I think of it. Adkins is going to be 50 this year, and I was trying to find someone who has a movie at this level at this age, and I can't think of it. Dolph was 52 when he did Command Performance, but that's not this. When you look at my top ten DTV stars of all time, I think I had him 11th, but with his record, I think he needs to go up to 8th, right behind Lamas at 7 and Dudikoff at 6, but depending on how this year goes, both of those two could be in his sights. (After that it's Daniels at 5, and Rothrock and Wilson tied for 3, so he has some work to do to crack the top 5.)
The other big performance is Marko Zaror, someone we've only seen a few other times on here, but anyone who's seen him in John Wick IV knows exactly who he is. And the thing is, while he plays a lot of baddies, here it's another level, absolutely chilling, think Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men with next-level martial arts skills. He would've gotten the first paragraph after the synopsis, except Adkins is the Hall of Famer, and his performance was great too, but looking at what Zaror has out there to watch, I imagine we'll be doing some movies of his soon where he does get that kind of spotlight. Again, we know what he brings to the table, so it's not like we didn't think he or Adkins were capable of what they give us here, but to see it happen is another thing. One of my 2026 New Year's resolutions for the site should be to get more Zaror on here, so we'll see if I can keep to that.
There's a short list of DTV action directors who are getting after it right now. Florentine, Johnson, and I think we can add James Nunn too. Now we have another name, Ernesto Díaz Espinoza. Like Florentine, Johnson, and Nunn, who have done some great stuff with Adkins, Espinoza and Zaror have some other films out there that I need to check out. There was also a massive local stunt team that all did a great job on this who should be applauded as well. I've spent a lot of time talking about the fight scenes between Adkins and Zaror because they were so amazing, but the two of them each had some scenes on their own with the stunt workers that were all fantastic too. Especially the bar/restaurant scene, where Zaror's character was taking on one after another. My heart will always be for the Blind Beggar's Bar scene in American Ninja 2, but the one here is one of the best we've seen in a long time, DTV or otherwise, and that stunt team played a huge part in that.
Finally, this is something I mentioned on the podcast episode too, but during that fantastic final fight between Adkins and Zaror, right as a punch was about to be thrown (or if you're a Real Housewife of New Jersey, "being flown"), Amazon cut to a commercial. We don't pay for the ad free version of Prime, so I guess that puts us at their mercy, but I feel like they could find better places to insert their ads. When we were growing up, there were TV edits of movies that made sure breaks were in natural spots in the film, often when reels were being changed, but now we no longer have reels, and streamers like Amazon have so many movies to deal with that they just put the ads on certain time stamps and call it good. This movie also isn't available on DVD, otherwise I'd agree that that's a better bet, especially if my local library had a copy; and to be fair, as far as streamers go, Prime is on the better side when it comes to ads, it's just this one was particularly galling. My hunch is this is only going to get worse, and I guess if we want to watch movies like Diablo that aren't on physical media, we'll have to live with it--or as Johnny Rzeznik said, "live around it."
And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently Amazon Prime is the only option, whether that's as part of your Prime membership, or I guess you could pay $4.99 to rent it without ads. I don't know if you need to go that far, but for me this is one of the best action movies of the last 25 years, so if you haven't seen it yet, check it out. And for the podcast episode I did with Chris the Brain, that's episode 239 in the archives.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27757546
And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
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