China O'Brien II

China O'Brien (1991) was immediately went into production after the first film. The first on was enjoyable and it was a hoot to see Cynthia Rothrock kick major butt in an English language film. But the sequel was not as good and it's more of the same for Clouse and Company. Robert Clouse at this point in his career was riding high on the success of his greatest film Enter the Dragon. Ever since that film, he's been trying to duplicate the same formula. But like they always say, lightning never strikes twice and Clouse has been trying to recapture the magic.

Rothrock is a phenomenal fighter and performer. This is her show and her fight scenes are a sight to behold. Sadly the rest of the film isn't as fun, the direction plods along and the script is nothing to brag about.

For Rothrock fans only.

China O' Brien II picks up where the first film left off, and it's almost literally more of the same. This means TV movie quality plot interspersed with some great martial arts action.

As a film, it's certainly not the worst ever made. It's about as solidly entertaining as any episode of Columbo or Walker Texas Ranger, and really no worse than any other martial arts flick. As with the first one, where the film excels is the fight scenes, which are dynamic and very well choreographed, with some brilliant OTT sound effects.

The film's plot centres around some bog standard pap about an escaped convict terrorising the town, and in that it makes some mistakes. As with the first film, the main bad guy is an older dude with no fighting skills whatsoever, and so there is really no final threat or showdown. Just a big free for all brawl involving loads of people.

It would have been nice to have China go up against another female martial arts villain as the main baddie, but we are talking early 90s here.

Where the film excels other than the fights is its lead character. The appeal of China O'Brien is her wholesomeness, which juxtaposes her fighting skill very well. There's no need to rely on blatant sex appeal, nudity, or an "edgy" persona, and the film does a very good job of showing that you can be tough, but still be a nice person - an important and very good role model.

Also, watching China beat the s-h-i-t out of endless waves of plaid shirted goons is infinitely satisfying.

While it starts ok, the film has some issues in the second half. A lot of the action scenes feel very cobbled together, and while the choreography is still great, the fights end all too soon - most notably the Keith Cooke/Billy Blanks duel, and the fight with the clawed henchmen played my Toshiro Obata of Turtles fame (why wasn't he the main villain?). They feel like runtime extenders which were shot post production, and they're just not long enough.

Still, as thin as the plot is, it's executed well enough to keep the pace going, and fans won't be disappointed by the highly satisfying action one bit.

One for the collection!

Although this film is a Golden Harvest co-production, don't expect the fight choreography to be much better than average. For one thing, the villains are not very skillful fighters, and even those few who appear intimidating at first are defeated rather easily (I hate it when that happens). There is still some of the usual good stuff from Richard Norton and Cynthia Rothrock here, but the rapid-fire Keith Cooke easily outshines them both. Biggest disappointment: early on, the movie introduces a super-fit stripper / assassin, and I was hoping for a climactic fight between her and Rothrock; not only does that never happen - she also disappears completely from the film! (**)

My review was written in August 1992 after watching the movie on Imperial video cassette.

Made in 1989, this Cynthia Rothrock vehicle is a haphazard affari, generating little interest in her ongoing exploits as femme sheriff of a small American town.

Nemesis this time is Harlow Marks, a bitter drug lord who's just escaped from prison. He's mad at Rothrock, and she's dead set on recapturing him.

Rothrock and her pals Richard Norton and Keith Cooke demonstrate their high-kicking ability in several fight scenes, but the film's storyline is perfunctory. Wrap-up is rapid and arbitrary.

Rothrock, poised for a network TV series, is still green in the acting department here, while co-star Norton's role is severely underwritten; he merely pops up out of nowhere when a fight is imminent.

Pic is from the same team that made Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon" 17 years earlier, but they didn't try very hard this time.

Just having sat through the 1990 movie "China O'Brien" and been positively surprised and entertained by it, I opted to carry on and watch the 1990 sequel "China O'Brien II". And just like the predecessor, it was a movie that I had never seen before, given my lack of interest in Cynthia Rothrock in general.

Writers Robert Clouse, Craig Clyde and James Hennessy put together a script and storyline that wasn't as entertaining as the predecessor. Sure, it was a watchable movie, but the narrative was a bit all over the place, and there wasn't really a properly cohesive red thread throughout the course of the movie, making it feel rather erratic and random.

It was good to have the three leads from the first movie return to reprise their characters and roles in the movie. And the acting performances in the movie were fair.

"China O'Brien II" was held afloat by the action and martial arts sequences throughout the course of the 92 minutes that the movie ran for.

This sequel, from director Robert Clouse, was disappointing in comparison to the predecessor.

My rating of "China O'Brien II" lands on a five out of ten stars.