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.