At some point someone needs to loudly signify the importance of the 1990s to the continued success and interest in the cheaply made, lowest common denominator DTV actioner that keeps, Wesley Snipes, Luke Goss and, Danny Trejo in Kendal Mint Cakes! They should loudly hail, Matthias Hues, Lauren Avedon and, Lorenzo Lamas for laying down all the heavy duty DTV groundwork that made, Frank Grillo possible!!!
'Breathing Fire' begins in an appropriately heated fashion, introducing the high-kicking Moore siblings, Charlie (Key Huy Quan) and Tony (Eddie Saavedra) busting out some pretty audacious moves at a martial arts tournament, whilst unbeknownst to them, their duplicitous father, Michael (Jerry Trimble) is in the chaotic midst of a gold bullion heist which features iconic Kung Fu destroyer, Bolo Yeung in drag, and so begins a blissfully bizarre 90s martial arts opus that zestfully operates in the phantasmagorical B-movie multiverse whereby both dastardly villains and stalwart heroes alike are all Olympian martial arts virtuosi!
The febrile, episodic narrative has its psychotronic kudos increased by aggressively inserting a Vietnam flashback amongst all the bodacious B-Boy dance moves, excruciating Kung Fu training montages and a brief, hilarious bar fight with an especially bellicose pair of agile little people that would look entirely appropriate in an Andy Sidaris movie! 'Breathing Fire' has a hypnotic, Ed. Wood Jr. Whimsicality, the witheringly duff dialogue, painfully monochromatic line readings from uniformly remedial 'actors', stridently raising this frenzied fight flick to the vertiginous, higher echelon of top tier bad movie genius!
Curiously, Bolo Yeung's character 'Thunder' seems ill named, being little more than a minor squall at best. The mighty one turns up, speed-flexes his elephantine pecs, hurls some terrified dudes around in his patented histrionic manner, and outside of looking pretty audacious in a frock you wouldn't know he was there!!?? In conclusion, 'Breathing Fire' is an odd duck, and having three directors probably didn't help matters. While the enjoyably frantic fight scenes are plentiful and pretty gnarly looking, the young protagonists are shrill, fatuous, and frequently disagreeable, to be quite blunt, Tony & Charlie Moore are two of the most irritating appendages since Material Madge bought some schmancy new face plugs, their innate dweebyness ultimately tainting what could have been an awesomely trashy fight flick, but there's no doubting the bouncy, pulse-pounding excellence of Paul 'Bloodsport' Hertzog's epic score.
