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?