Well, first and foremost from this 2016 action/martial arts movie's cover, I must admit that I was expecting a tad more contents from the movie. But then again, I wasn't really knowing what I was getting myself into here in 2021, as I sat down to watch "Karate Kill" from writer and director Kurando Mitsutake. But it being a Japanese movie that I hadn't already seen, I needed no persuasion to sit down to watch it.
And while I did manage to sit through the entire movie to the end, I cannot claim that "Karate Kill" was a movie that was overly entertaining or enjoyable. It was a fairly simple and dumb - if you think about it - movie, with a dubious storyline that just felt too linear, forced and half-hearted. It was the lack of a properly and thoroughly thought through plot that held the movie back.
Sure, the action sequences in the movie were good, though certain aspects of the movie were less than mediocre. Such things as shotgun shells apparently burst into sparks upon contact with human skin and clothing, or that laughable and horrible animated CGI blood splatter.
Little did it help that the acting in the movie was mediocre at best, and the fact that the dialogue was so simplistic that it felt it was written by a middle-schooler.
"Karate Kill" is a movie that requires absolutely no brain activity from the audience. You just lean back and watch it, then most likely will very quickly forget about it entirely after it has been seen. I, for one, wasn't impressed with this movie.
My rating of the 2016 "Karate Kill" lands on a less than mediocre four out of ten stars. There are an abundance of far better martial arts movies readily available on the the Asian movie market.
