Combate

The general acting is OK for a zero budget movie like this. It is FAR from good but the bigger problem than the actor's abilities is the horrible directing. The whole make of the movie looks like a film school project of a beginners class and that's 50% the director's fault. 40% of the rest that is bad is on the seriously bad and cheap production. I wouldn't be surprised if it was made over the course of two weekends with a budget of less than 10.000$.

The story is predictable but if you watch a movie of this type you are probably a martial arts fan and can forgive a lot. I know I have enjoyed movies with a story that's worse if the action rocks. So how about the fights? In few and fitting words: Unimaginative and boring. You can see that Beau Casper Smart has the moves - being a professional dancer it comes as no surprise. But it seems the choreographer has no experience choreographing fight scenes. It looks like he watched a few MMA fights, then made up a list of moves that he thinks are typical, pressed shuffle and just went with the outcome. There are barely any dynamics in the fights, the camera angles are boring and mostly sub par, the cuts feel like someone said "hey, don't forget a cut and angle change there, dude" at some point.

I think if you put a real fight choreographer in charge of the fights, give the camera to someone who's used one for more than a couple of family vacations and make sure the director isn't stoned or on the crapper while the action is happening you could get some really good results out of Beau Casper Smart. Comparing his acting to Van Damme or Segal he actually looks pretty good. Compare him to Scott Adkins, though, and you see he still has a loooong way ahead of him. But I'd definitely watch it if he gave another martial arts flick a try.

The movie is about a kid called 'Street' who is threaten by a 'Mr. Big character into fighting for him for free or have his family hurt ... and there is no reason given for him to not go to police through bad writing.

The idea is there, but it's not been though about enough (though the script was re-written by a 3rd writer so maybe she messed it up, who knows?) The biggest problem with this movie is the sound. The music comes in loud and hard when it's not needed and drowns out the actors' dialogue and at other times, when music is playing in the background of the room and it makes sense for it to be loud... you can barely hear it. The sound designer needs to give back their paycheck.

There wasn't any real build up to the finale and some characters were under-written, but if you're a fan of martial arts movies, you'll probably get past it all for a single viewing.

The actors do a good enough job but some acting looks bad at times due to camera placement.

Whew, this was a tough one to sit through. I'm good friends with a member of the cast (who will remain nameless in this review) I was curious why he didn't hound me to check out his latest film. Normally, I get overwhelmed with requests from him to watch his work, now I see why. I'll try to keep this as professional as possible but I have to be honest like I always am. Lets start with the cast, my friend withstanding, this cast was just flat out awful. The lead Beau Smart carrying the lead of a film is about as far fetched as me playing CF for my beloved Dodgers next season, sounds great in fantasy land but in reality it would be an epic fail. In spite of his clear shortcomings as an actor, much less a lead, the supporting cast is almost as bad. Even my friend, who is definitely a strong actor, falls a bit short on bringing his character to life. This tells me one thing, the director let down the cast. Now, I believe the director was clearly in over his head, but giving him all the blame would be like a NFL team firing their head coach after a 2-14 season. The players still have to play and this cast just wasn't up for the challenge and/or simply aren't skilled enough. Enough on the cast and the director, nothing really redeeming on those fronts.

The story? Well, my first response would be "what story?." A film like this isn't really designed to captivate an audience through story telling, I get that, but at least make an effort. The martial arts aspect is clearly the star of this film, but it's not strong enough to carry the film throughout. The story becomes very predictable, almost hokey which it was not intended to be at all. The very underwhelming, and at times embarrassingly bad, cast doesn't help infuse anything that would be even loosely considered interesting. What is most frustrating about this film is that they obviously stole story lines from other films, which is fine because it's really a common practice nowadays in cinema. The difference is that when most films do this, they enhance the story they are ripping off, Street actually lifted these story lines and went the other way by watering them down, like watching the cinematic version of skim milk.

Technically the film was fine, considering its a low budget project. There were a few issues, mainly lighting and a few focus pulls, but nothing that compares to the misfortune that was the unfortunate combination of acting, directing and writing. This marks the lowest rating of any film that I have ever reviewed. I love indie films and the filmmakers that put so much into bringing their work to life, but this project just failed miserably on all the key aspects.

This movie for SURE would have been better if the lead was not Beau Smart. This guy cannot act at all. I imagine he got this role because Jennifer Lopez is his girlfriend. Not a bad story, but this guy Beau Smart should get smarter and go back to dancing. I love fighter movies and thought this would be good. Again, it was a good story . Most of the acting was pretty good. it dragged a bit, but I think I was out of my mind because Beau's NON acting was driving me crazy so it felt like the movie was 100 hours long. They keep telling me my review is not long enough but I do not know what else to say. The plot was not bad and I thought Beau's acting was terrible. What else to write. Better cast next time.

This movie was just awful. I give it 3 stars for actors who are at least better than a high school actor trying to pad a college application with extra activities. But the rest of it... I don't even know where to begin.

The script is basic. Just simple, non imaginative, cliché. The directing is the same. I will leave those elements alone, because you can almost enjoy those aspects in bad, low budget movies when you are going in to them knowing it was a bad low budget movie.

The star of the movie, the fighting, was OK at best. For such an obviously low budget movie that brought in some MMA names, they should have really done much more to make sure the fighting was way better. And maybe they did...maybe it was just lost in the editing. But none of the fights had any sort of drama. No build. No gripping action.

But the thing that KILLS this move...the bad technical aspects. The utter lack of proper post production. I hate seeing seams in the walls of cheap sets. It is a sure fire give away that you are dealing with low budget. The lighting had no character to it. Did anyone do any color correction? It looked like raw footage. And the sound mix was the absolute killer here. It really played like a temp cut that they rolled out because they just gave up. No attempt at SFX through most of the edit, other scenes just had a background SFX track playing on a loop, music cues dropping out all of a sudden, popping in hot in other places, playing loud under dialogue in other spots so you couldn't hear a thing. If the producers don't have respect enough for their film to finish it properly then nobody should but the time into watching this. Unless you are making a low budget film and want to see a good example of why post production can help a bad movie out, then watch this as a cautionary tale. It will convince you to find more money for post for sure.