High Voltage is about a group of young bank robbers, led by Antonio Sabato Jr., and including Lochlyn Munro and Amy Smart. They think they have the score of their life coming when they rob a bank in Chinatown, but Sabato Jr. discovers as they're raiding the vault that this is the bank where top Vietnamese gangster George Cheung launders his and other gangsters' money. He tries to abort the robbery, but it's too late, Cheung wants his pound of flesh, and will stop at nothing to get it. Initially running felt like the best option, but now Sabato Jr. and crew want to get all Cheung's cash and take him down, and Sabato Jr. knows just the person to help him do it: Shannon Lee, bank manager and unhappy romantic partner to Cheung, she's all too happy to help Sabato Jr. and company so she can get away from Cheung too. Will they succeed?
This is some good old fashioned Florentine here, maybe a tier below his best stuff, but at the top of that second tier for sure. Great action set pieces, with names we recognize, and this fun mix of Westerns, 90s heist flicks, and Hong Kong Gun Fu. We do get some lull points, and some of those work, like the scenes with Sabato Jr. and Lee, but mostly they're there to let us relax between action scenes, even if they have a real purpose of character development. Outside of Sabato Jr. and Lee's characters, do I care if anyone else bites it in this? Probably not, just throw me onto a set somewhere, fire a bunch of guns, blow some shit up, and have some people beat the crap out of each other. It's a time-honored tradition that just works, and this one does that.
By my count this is 17 directed films on the site for Isaac Florentine, plus a half for his work on Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon, which puts him in a three-way tie with Joseph Merhi and Fred Olen Ray for second all-time, behind Albert Pyun (co-director on Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon) and his 44. He has two other films for us to review on the site, Hounds of War, which Ty and I covered on episode 277 of the podcast; and Desert Kickboxer, his first ever directorial feature film. So that means Desert Kickboxer is the only film of his I haven't seen yet, which I think gives me a good idea of where High Voltage ranks among his movies. My favorites of his are the two Ninja movies, Cold Harvest, and Bridge of Dragons. Then we have Special Forces and US Seals II, and I think this slots in with those, fun 90-minute actioners that do what you want from them. What I think is interesting is I would put this above everything he's done since Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, which I think says less about Florentine, and more about the restrictions on DTV filmmaking in the age of streaming and industry consolidation. When I look at his run from this in 1997 to Special Forces in 2003, I don't know that any of those movies would've been given the money and resources to be made at that quality today, and it's not like any of those were breaking the bank! What's great about Tubi though is we can go back and revisit gems like these, or visit them for the first time like I did.
We last saw Antonio Sabato Jr. in 2011 when we covered The Base II, which was his second time on the site after Princess of Mars, so we don't see a lot of him on here, and I discovered that doesn't make sense when you look at his IMDb bio, as he has a lot of other DTV stuff, especially from around this time, but I had no idea and just thought he went more mainstream after this. He does a good enough job here, maybe not the Dolph, Adkins, Daniels, or even Marshall Teague you expect from a Florentine lead, but for what the movie wanted he fit the bill well. Equally great at fitting the bill was Shannon Lee, though it would've been nice to see her do some more martial arts. Unlike Sabato Jr., this is our first time seeing her on the site, and she doesn't have a lot of credits, but there are a few movies of hers out there that we could do, including Cage II, which we talked about last week on The Firing Line post. She did do an episode of the show Warrior in 2023, so maybe she'll do some DTV stuff in the near future as well. Some of these 90s nostalgia films like Last Kumite could use someone like her in them, which would be great to see.
This is probably as good a place as any for a big cast round-up, as there are a lot of people in this. We have Amy Smart as a member of the gang, the same year Starship Troopers is released, and two years before Varsity Blues and Outside Providence, when she really takes off. She has made her way back to the DTV world recently with 2024's Held Hostage in My House, which sounds like a great Lifetime title, but was a direct to Netflix film. Also in the gang was Lochlyn Munro, who's no stranger to our site or the DTV world. Both he and Smart are good as members of the gang, even if his character had more to do than hers. William Zabka's back after we saw him in our SePMtember PM post. Here he's not a scenery chewing baddie, but is fun as an unhinged biker who first helps Sabato Jr. and co., only to double cross them because he wants the money to himself. The baddie is played by George Cheung, who we usually see in more supporting roles, but does a great job as the main baddie. We haven't tagged him yet, and when I looked up his IMDb bio, he doesn't have as much stuff that we've covered on here as I thought, so maybe sometime down the road he'll get that tag. Someone who does have it is the late James Lew, who plays Cheung's second-in-command. Always great to see Lew, he was one of those names that helped make these 90s DTV actioners that much better, and will be missed.
Finally, terms like Tarentino-esque or ripping off Tarentino come up a lot, especially in late 90s movies like this where it was hard to not see the shadow Pulp Fiction was casting over them. That said, it can be reductive if we're not thinking about all the movies that existed before Pulp Fiction that Tarentino was borrowing from too, which begs the question, are they sharing the same influence as opposed to one borrowing from the other? I think you can make the case in this with the scene in the bar where Amy Smart is playing a cover of "I Can't Help Falling in Love" on the jukebox and dancing around to it that that's kind of biting on Pulp Fiction, though it also kind of feels like the 60s movies that Tarentino was taking that kind of thing from too, and part of why I may give Florentine the benefit of the doubt is much of this film feels more like he was drawing from old Westerns and 60s crime movies, and then giving it a modern touch, as opposed to riding the Pulp Fiction wave; but at the very least, you could make the argument that Pulp Fiction and the need to cash in on that gave filmmakers like Florentine the greenlight to add more elements like that in their movies, or even the addition of them made for a better hook for investors and distributors. Probably the most obvious Tarentino rip-off elements we complain about are the quirky gangster conversations, or an overall talkiness that sounds too derivative to be anything but, which this movie doesn't have; but these touches Florentine add in this film that harken back to an earlier movie age are probably better understood as coming from a similar inspiration rather than an out-and-out rip-off, but as I said above, Pulp Fiction cast such a large shadow, that it's not always easy to unpack that when we see it.
And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on a bunch of streamers here in the States, including Tubi, which I think is a great way to go. This is earlier Florentine with some great names and great action that you may have missed (like I did), or haven't seen in a while, but I think it's worth a watch (or rewatch if that's the case).
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129992
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