Kill Order (2018)

Director: James Mark
Notable Cast: Chris Mark, Daniel Park, Denis Akiyama, Melee Hutton, Jessica Clement, Jason Gosbee, Reuben Langdon, Alain Moussi

For years, Blood Brothers has been standing behind the champions of direct-to-home video film making and, in particular, those who are making an artform out of the action films that are overlooked for theatrical releases and end up lost in the shuffle of the numerous films released each Tuesday. Directors like Isaac Florentine, Roel Reine, and James Nunn are all making waves in the genre as true vulgar auteurs. Now, you can add James Mark to that growing list.

James Mark’s debut film, Kill Order, is a modern low budget action classic. In its simplicity, the film shows its true colors and they brilliant and bold as a throwback action film brimming with martial arts and broad stroke gimmicks. It uses the tropes of the genre, spins them with a slightly science fiction spin, and then just delivers the thrills and spills that one wants from an action film without the spectacle of budget that too often gets in the way of core foundational strengths. It’s not a perfect film, but the better aspects of it are so strong and charming that they easily overcome the places where it stutters. Enough so that action fans are going to find one of the true gems of the genre this year.

Kickboxer: Retaliation (2018)

Director: Dimitri Logothetis
Notable Cast: Alain Moussi, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Hafbor Bjornsson, Christopher Lambert, Sara Malakul Lane, Mike Tyson, Ronaldinho Gaucho, Wanderlei Silva, Fabricio Werdum

When the Kickboxer remake, titled Kickboxer: Vengeance, was getting a release in the US, it was already announced that the sequel was in production and that it would actually be part of a trilogy. These days it's hard enough to get a low budget action film funded, even with mainstream names like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dave Bautista, let alone an entire trilogy, so there were a lot of expectations that came in tow with the first film. Of course, Vengeance was a decent little actioner with enough charm to pull off its sillier scripting, but it was hardly a film that reinvented the wheel. Fun and entertaining, but hardly more than that. It’s sequel, Kickboxer: Retaliation and the focus of this review, is an even stranger beast. While its predecessor struggled with finding the balance between being a serious film and the cheesiness of being an entertaining modern B-action flick, Retaliation has none of these issues. Instead, it embraces its outlandish concepts with an obvious tongue-in-cheek approach that works to make it far more entertaining as it abandons most of its more serious moments. This can be problematic as Retaliation attempts to craft a much larger world and story, but when you’re having this much fun with how outrageous a film is...can it really be considered all that bad?

Kickboxer: Vengeance (2016)

Director: John Stockwell

Notable Cast: Alain Moussi, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dave Bautista, Sara Malakul Lane, Gina Carano, Georges St. Pierre, Darren Shahlavi

As the remake and reboot train keeps chugging along, it’s going to continually reap the benefits of nostalgia for a lot of properties. For those of us that love the originals, we can only hope that they honor and recreate the same heart while giving us something decently fresh while doing so. Such is the case with the latest nostalgia-trip-reimagined Kickboxer: Vengeance. Don’t let the fancy new subtitle fool you, this is not a sequel to overlooked action franchise of yesteryear. Vengeance is a remake of the original Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle that set him on a road for stardom. In many ways, it’s one of those remakes that works because it understands why the original worked and retains that while bringing something different to the table at the same time. I’d be lying if I said that Kickboxer: Vengeance is a great film, at least in classical critiquing standards, but it’s also a film that inherently knows what it is and delivers on such promises. Perhaps it was my generally negative attitude going into the film, but Vengeance came out as something pleasantly surprising as a modern action flick.