Karate Tiger VI - Entscheidung in Rio

My review was written in January 1993 after watching the film on Live video cassette.

Third entry in the series that four years ago helped make Jean-Claude Van Damme a star is a routine martial arts pic that benefits from attractive Brazilian location photography. Briefly released theatrically lat fall, the film has better-than-average chances for a video following.

Repeating from part two, Sasha Mitchell plays the uppity hero, a kickboxing champ headed to Rio de Janeiro for a tournament. Once arrived, Mitchell is befriended by street urchin Noah Verduzco and saves his young sister (Althea Miranda) from the clutches of brothel owner Richard Comar.

Coincidentally, Comar also manages evil kickboxer Ian Jaklin. Predictably Miranda is kidnapped and Mithcell is ordered to throw the big match against Jacklin to protect her. A corny happy ending sets the stage for yet another sequel.

Mitchell, unlike most of the protagonists in this genre an actor first and martial artist second, is a very personable lead and acquits himself well in the action scenes. Supporting cast is nondescript.

David Sloan and his trainer Xian arrives in Buenos Aires for a kickboxing tournament. Once there they befriend a young boy and his sister living on the streets. When the promoter of David's championship rival turns out to be a pimp the boy's sister is stolen away due to the value of virgins. David is held captive by the pimp, Lane and is forced to do heavy work weakening his body. Can David stay focused in order to free the girl and win his fight? This should be called "Kickboxer 3 - so very lame". It should never be a series anyway! Clue to a poor series of films - if Jean Claude Van Damme bails after the first one! The plot here is lazy - it paints it's bad guys big and tries to set up a fight every so often to make it interesting. There's no characters and it's even hard to care about the children. You don't believe that any of the good guys could get hurt, so you don't care what they get into.

The performances are pretty bad, the street boy is good but Sasha Mitchell acts like a spoilt kid from LA. With his clothes and tattoos he looks a bit like a clean-cut Eminem. Dennis Chan is supposed to give comic relief as Xian, however he misses the mark most of the time and comes off looking like a low-rent Mr Miyagi from the Karate Kid series. Comar is a terrible bad guy - unbelievable and unsympathetic to the end, while Sloan's championship challenger is your standard mad, bad guy fare.

The fights are ok I guess - standard kickboxing stuff, but they are what the film is all about, and as such they should be great! They not - which I guess means the film fails on the most basic level. Overall a pretty poor film that doesn't even reach the low standard it set for itself.

Maybe it's because I don't have too much expectation when I approach the 'Kickboxer' series but I have to say that I find all of these movies enjoyable, all things considered. This third instalment is set in Rio which does add a dash of exotic flavour to proceedings. In it, our Kickboxing champion, David Sloan, arrives in Brazil for a competition but soon becomes involved with rescuing a girl from a sex slave racket.

Apart from the South American setting, what sets this one apart from the other previous entries in the series is that we now have the kickboxer going around shooting people. The introduction of guns into the mix gives this instalment more of a standard action-thriller feel. There are a few fights but the martial arts side of the story is definitely more marginalised in this one. Sasha Mitchell does have a dopey and personable charm in the lead role; while everyone else does what's expected of them. It moves at a fast pace, it doesn't have any surprises but its good straightforward fun.

KICKBOXER 3: THE ART OF WAR sees Sasha Mitchell and Dennis Chan teaming up to battle some Brazilian thugs in this South American adventure. It's very much a cookie-cutter production, with the actual kickboxing tournament sidelined in favour of some distinctly B-movie style shenanigans and high energy bouts. That said, it's a film not without a certain early 1990s charm, in that acting and plot are sidelined in favour of plentiful, hard-hitting action.

The storyline is basic to say the least and involves a nefarious bad guy who has a habit of kidnapping innocent girls to use in his brothel. Inevitable, our hero and his sidekick end up getting involved with said villain, and plenty of fisticuffs and shoot-outs ensue. The best thing about the movie is the action; it will never win prizes for originality, but it certainly proves to be satisfying. The choreography is basic but the style is pleasingly violent and packed to the brim with mayhem.

Mitchell himself is a wooden, stilted actor and yet he proves himself a powerhouse in the fight scenes; certainly a guy you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of. Dennis Chan, however, is the best person in this, bringing plenty of that trademark mentor charm from the original. The rest of the cast, both good guys and bad, are distinctly undistinguished, but as sequels go this straightforward B-movie isn't without charm.

Kickboxer 3 isn't worth the money, or the rental. Dennis Chan is a comic sidekick and teacher to David Slone who plays a chilsed jawed kickboxer who seems to resemble that bad karate kid from Karate Kid III.

Anyway, the film has David going to Brazil for a kickboxing fight but gets drawn into the seedy world of underage prositutes or something and gets drawn into the local riff-raff.

Even though he's only a kickboxer and only there to kick the ass of the Ivan Drago type kickboxer he goes out on a mission to take out the local bad guy, who isn't even Portuegese or Brazilian, but American.

The fight sequences are okay - but that is it, nothing compared to other martial art movies you can get for the same price.

Avoid it. 1/10