Bullet Points: Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor

I’ll never get used to seeing Sasha Mitchell in any role other than the kooky Cody Lambert in Step by Step. I know that the man is a legitimate martial artist with some kickboxing titles on his mantle at home but it doesn’t make it any easier for me when he struts around in this movie with that smirk on his face. Despite my preconceived notions about the man, it’s hard to be a fan of action movies (especially martial arts films) and not love the Kickboxer series. It has been going strong since 1989  and shows little signs of slowing down after the success of the most recent iteration. Seeing movies that I’ve loved for the past 25 years being successfully rebooted puts a big smile on my face.

Synopsis: David Sloan (Sasha Mitchell) now finds himself wrongly imprisoned and his wife as a prisoner of his longtime enemy Tong Po. The DEA meets with Sloan and gives him the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by infiltrating a fighting tournament run by Tong Po and find his abducted wife in the process. Sloan disguises himself by wearing a pair of Ray-Bans and teams up with a couple of do-gooders at the tournament but can he finally take out the nefarious Tong Po once and for all?

• Recap: The film starts with a several minutes recap of the first few movies. Well, it mostly talks about the first two films in the series. Setting up the fact that Tong Po crippled Eric Sloan, lost to Kurt, then killed them both, tracked down David, lost to him, and then somehow set him up so that he’s now in prison. It was good for me because I haven’t watched the second or third movie in the series in quite some time so I didn’t remember any of it after JCVD. I was just praying that it wasn’t going to be the best part of the film.

• WTF Wax Face?: Michel Qissi is out and Kamel Krifa is now in as Tong Po. They might be trying too hard to make him look like Qissi because his face looks like it was done in a really dark trailer 1 hour before shooting began. It seriously looks like he was present for some sort of explosion in a candle-making factory.
• Bad Wigs and Furniture: Our best chance to see David Sloan fight before he gets to the tourney is when he strolls into a bar and immediately picks a fight with everyone there over a girl he’s never seen before. The dudes at the bar take turns attacking Sloan and getting thrown violently through windows and crashing through tables. It’s a wonder that we never actually see any of their wigs fly off.
• Fighting Tournament Affirmative Action: You can’t have a tournament style fighting movie without a dude doing capoeira.

• Mighty Mouse: Michele “Mouse” Krasnoo, who plays the little blonde girl who somehow doesn’t get obliterated in the first 12 seconds of her fight, gets extra special respect from me after I saw on her IMDB page that she was on an episode of one of my favorite show of the 90’s, WMAC Masters!
• Weezy: The most distracting part of watching the final fight with Tong Po and David Sloan is Sasha’s constant and annoying breathing. Don’t respond to me with some crap about his diaphragm because that shit sounds dumb as hell.

• Getting Some Action: The movies offers action fans plenty of fight scenes throughout the film and I was also happy to see it also offered several smokin’ hot chicks exposing themselves! Those are actually two of my favorite things in the world! It took me a little while to come around on Sasha’s fight scenes as they just looked so slow but by the end I was enjoying every second of them. Brad Thornton (who plays Lando Smith) and Michele Krasnoo (who plays Meagan Laurence) provide several fights as well and while I’ll never buy Krasnoo kicking the shit out of a bunch of seemingly tough guys, Thornton’s style was different enough from Mitchell to look better by comparison. Kickboxer 4′s flaws are certainly not in the action department.
• Just Wondering: Is “The Aggressor” a reference to the style of masturbation that the threesome scene was causing with teenage boys?

• I love that one of the fighters in the tourney was wearing a t shirt that said “Dacascos Kung Fu”. It’s also rather fitting as the fifth movie in the series starred none other than Mark Dacascos.
• A good way to not get out of prison on good behavior is to beat the shit out of guys in the yard and then get thrown in the hole. By the way, shouldn’t it be called “better behavior” and not “good behavior”?
• Are we sure that this isn’t another Frank Dux story because I could’ve sworn he was falsely arrested, broken out of prison, took down a drug cartel, and then returned to teach kids at some point in his life. It certainly sounds like one of his tales.
• David Sloan is the really casual version of Neo from The Matrix. He dresses in all black but it’s mostly sweatpants and t-shirts.
• Albert Pyun, who directed Kickboxer 2: The Road Back, returned to the franchise to direct Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor.
• If I am going to come up with a fake name to enter a fighting tournament, I want a better name than “Jack Jones”. How about John Mercy? Or what about Francis Dukes?
• Mad props to Brad Thornton for banging it out with the amazingly sexy Jill Pierce!