Best of the Best 4 - Le feu aux poudres

They should have warned us :(

This is a long way from the excellence of the first two movies and really the movie doesn't belong to the Best of the Best franchise.

All the heart has been sucked out of it and we are left only with a below average actioner that has a plot that can only be described as cliched.

Are there some good fight scenes? Sure but you have to wade your way through a fair bit of rubbish to get to them.

Watch it as a stand alone film and convince yourself that is is not part of the above average franchise that is Best of the Best.

Unlike the producers, I have given you plenty of warning :)

I thought this was the worst of the four Best of the Best Movies. Although Phillip Rhee in my opinion does a good job in all, I thought the acting was for the most part subpar in this film and didn't think the plot was all that great. Some decent fight scenes.

The fourth and final entry in this franchise, directed and co-written by franchise veteran Phillip Rhee, is decent enough if hardly inspired. This time, our intrepid martial artist hero is working as a self-defense advisor for the police force when he gets caught up in a plot hatched by murderous Russian counterfeiters. When he's forced to kill a crooked detective who's in on the scheme, he must take it on the lam - all while doing everything possible to protect his little girl (Jessica Huang).

"Best of the Best 4: Without Warning" doesn't have *that* much to do with the martial arts, although it does feature the requisite scenes with Tommy Lee getting a chance to show off his impressive skills. It's pretty standard, unimaginative stuff, with no surprises and a bunch of typical characters. That said, Rhee is still enjoyable to watch as he struts *his* stuff, and there's one fairly good chase sequence. At least there's a respectable body count, and the baddies are mostly irredeemable garbage whose demises are eagerly anticipated.

One good thing that the movie can boast is a solid lineup of character actors in supporting roles, even if they've been better utilized in other things: Ernie Hudson (the "Ghost Busters" movies) as a jerk detective, Art La Fleur ("Cobra") as a store owner, Tobin Bell (the "Saw" franchise) as the main baddie, Chris Lemmon ("Just Before Dawn") as another detective, Sven-Ole Thorsen ("Conan the Barbarian") as one of the many disposable henchmen, and Paul Gleason ("The Breakfast Club") as a helpful priest. It's particularly good to see Gleason cast against type here, since he's best known for jerk characters himself.

Mindless fun overall, mostly for die-hard action fanatics who aren't particularly demanding.

Six out of 10.

I loved the first 3 best of the best movies. Yes they are just simple action movies, with no great plot or story, but i liked them for what they are. This one reminds me of a low budget Die Hard 4.0 remake(in fact Die Hard 4.0 was made many years after this one) The story is very simple and easy to follow, Tommy Lee gets a disc and evil Russian Mobsters want it back, so Tommy Lee is gonna kick some Russian Butt, it did however not feel like a best of the best movie(the previous movies did not seem to matter, i mean Tommy Lee has a cop brother in law , why didn't he asked him to take the disc, and what about the girl from the third movie?) All in all, a action movie with some good martial arts. 6/10

Is there a Best of the Best 3.5? I'm just asking because in this film Tommy is a widower with a six year old kid and last time we saw Tommy he was young free and single. He's also got his Tae Kwon Do school back after telling folk in the last film he gave it up. Hey-ho. Let's not over think things.

Who's gonna mess with Tommy's family this time and then act all surprised when his cheesy feet start zooming towards their faces, knocking their teeth out and stuff? This time you've got the bad guy from Saw, some other guy, and Killian's henchman from The Running Man out to get a disc from Tommy that he didn't even know he had, as some girl slipped it into his pocket shortly before being machine gunned to death by a bad guy from some counterfeiting gang.

This gang steal and entire truck at the start of the film and waste loads of cops so we know they mean business. They also prove to be the biggest bunch of morons Tommy's had to face, as they do the one thing that Tommy hates the most – That's right, they target his family.

Blah blah fight scenes, blah blah threats. Tommy kicks his way through a lot of bad guys in this one, but I reckon we spend a bit too much time with the bad guys in-fighting rather that Tommy jumping all over their heads. He's also managed to go up against bad guys that take themselves out! Not only are they all threatening and shooting each other, one of them manages to kill more bad guys than Tommy.

Seriously, there's loads of bad guys chasing Tommy at one end of a tunnel on motorbikes, and this one guy at the other end of the tunnel grabs a truck and speeds towards them, then misses Tommy, then hits the rest of the bad guys causing a huge explosion that takes out a helicopter too. All Tommy had to do was get out of the way.

Phillip Rhee also directs this one too, and it'll do for a quick action fix. The second film's the best one in the series by my reckoning. I think there was plans for a fifth one where Tommy didn't even bother getting out of bed while the bad guys just took care of themselves.