D'homme à homme

Of the three DTV "Rowdy" Roddy Piper flicks I've watched over the past week or so (this, Jungleground and No Contest), this is by far the worst. All three were very conventional action flicks. This one is a very predictable cop buddy story, very similar to, say, Ridley Scott's Black Rain. Piper plays an American cop whose beat is Chinatown. His partner is killed by a Chinese gangster (Andy Yim), who then runs off to Burma. Piper is paired with a Chinese cop, Ong Soo Han, who is also after him and the two go to Burma to find him. The thing that makes this film so bad is that Piper is super racist. It's no fun watching an actor you like be a dick for most of the movie. Sure, his character arc has him become less racist over the course of the movie, and, of course, he goes from not wanting to be partnered with Han to liking him. But it's more like Piper goes from making mean racist jokes to more kind-hearted racist jokes. The film is pretty racist itself, with a lot of terrible jokes about Asians eating gross stuff and having characters do very silly looking martial arts. One character's name is Bong Bong and Piper keeps referring to him as Ding Dong ("No cawr me Ding Dong, assho!" he will exclaim). It gets better as it goes along and some of the action sequences near the end are decent, but it's generally pretty bad.

At first glance, the direct-to-home-video Roddy Piper vehicle "Last to Surrender" threatens to be resolutely routine. You have your typical rogue cop hero, a partner who gets killed, and an antagonistic relationship between the xenophobic hero and the foreigner (in this case, a Chinese detective) with whom he's forced to work. The target is The Tiger (Andy Yim), a slippery and slimy drug lord.

"Last to Surrender" doesn't exactly get off to a great start, but it's lifted a bit by its second half. Filmed on location in Indonesia, it has the two good guys stranded in the wilderness after a helicopter crash. So they HAVE to learn to get along, and survive, before they can even think of combating the ruthless villain.

"Rowdy" Roddy has a typically solid screen presence (even if his character is pretty much pure cliche), and he has genuine odd-couple chemistry with Ong Soo Han (who plays Wu Yin, the aforementioned Chinese detective). He also has some good chemistry with pretty female lead Angela Ying-Ying Tong, who plays a villager named Chat Chai who rescues Piper. Yim makes for a decent-enough bad guy, and fight choreographer Qingfu Pan also appears on screen as a comedy relief lowlife named "Bong Bong".

"Last to Surrender" is still largely average as far as these kinds of movies go, but it has enough going for it - including a literally explosive finish - to make it a modestly acceptable diversion.

My favorite bit: Nick Ford explaining to Wu Yin how the "good cop / bad cop" routine works.

Six out of 10.

All things considered, this wasn't a bad movie... definitely an improvement from some of Piper's others. It was nice to see him go through a movie without using (hardly any) wrestling moves. The fight scenes were good, and Piper did a good job in his role throughout the movie as a sort of "bad cop", however, the ending left a lot to be desired. I had never heard of Ong before, but he seemed to do a decent job as well.

I still want to see how Piper would fare with a truly good script and several well-known supporting actors. I think he has potential, and it'd be nice to see him in a true action flick as either the protagnoist or antagonist.