China Salesman (2018)

Director: Tan Bing

Notable Cast: Dong-Xue Li, Mike Tyson, Janicke Askevold, Li Ai, Eriq Ebouaney, Steven Seagal, Zijan Wang

When China Salesman was first announced there was a lot of hype around the film. It was a Chinese film, but it would feature both Mike Tyson and Steven Seagal. They were also going to have a fight. Cause, why the hell not? As a person who grew up watching Tyson fight in the ring and Seagal flip people haphazardly on the silver screen, I was immediately intrigued. There was almost no chance that this film would be good, particularly when the synopsis was revealed and the big appeal to western audiences would be this battle of larger than life personalities. When the opportunity came to review this film, I leapt at it knowing full well that China Salesman would not be a great film. Nay, it wasn’t even going to be a good film. If it was a film at all, I was going to be pleasantly surprised.

Surprise, surprise, China Salesman is a film, but it is very terrible.

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?