Circle of Fury

In the beginning, it was not so bad. Then, it got bad. It got worse. Some guys seem to like the woman vs man fight. It was awful fake. And it was awful. I could not watch this flick. Sorry. Seen on Tubi, the free streaming site, which used to have some nice tools to organize your choices. Those tools are gone, replaced by terrible movies, and live TV.

Making a good martial arts movie is tough, and it's no surprise when even experienced action filmmakers deliver disappointing results within the subgenre. This is understandable. But every once in a while, you see a karate flick and realize that the people behind it had absolutely no business attempting this kind of feature. Such is the case with CIRCLE OF FURY. This is a feature that wants to get in on the MMA film market but doesn't have the first clue of how to do it, to the point that all of the dreadful direct-to-video MMA flicks that came before and after it can breathe a sigh of relief and find solace in the fact that at least they're not the absolute worst – that title more than likely belongs to this one.

The story: A homeless veteran (Randy Spence) must wrestle with his conscience and grapple with opponents as he is coerced into the underground empire and fight club run by his childhood friend (Adonis Williams).

This is not an ambitious movie, so it's all the more surprising when it stumbles with basic things like productive dialogue. The movie's visual presentation is decent enough, but you'll be tempted to mute the audio whenever characters interact. When they aren't delivering forced, inappropriate lines that clearly sounded better in the writer's head, they're engaging in redundant and time-wasting exchanges that have no place in a movie with a story to tell. Adonis Williams' character is the main offender of the latter ill: Williams is charismatic enough, but it seems as though the director's instructions to him were "You can't talk enough; fill up every possible moment with banter and bluster." You can probably imagine how quickly that gets old.

The action content is in serious trouble. While I have definitely seen worse fight scenes than this, I have rarely seen so many bad ones piled on top of each other, each doing the same things wrong again and again. Most of the on screen fighters have some martial arts background, but it seems like most have never filmed a fight before and are foremost concerned with not actually striking their opponents. We're told that these are MMA bouts, but even though some fighters find the time to throw in an armbar, too many of these are bland slugfests. The choreography will have its moments here and there, but their dragging pace and the terrible camera-work makes these fights almost collectively worth skipping. Yuck.

When the most pleasant surprises a movie has to offer are instances of its goofy characters making sensible decisions for a change, there's really no reason to watch unless you're purposely looking for a bad movie. CIRCLE OF FURY is helplessly poor, possessing the bare tools to make a decent film but not the dexterity to wield them. If you're thinking about seeing this one, you better be ready for some serious shoddiness.

So I was watching some random videos on youtube and ran across a fight scene between Christina Rose's character "Augustina" and the main character played by Randy Spence named "Johnny." Augustina kicks Johnny's butt and it's done in a comical way. If that fight was done well, I figured the rest of the film would have good fights and be funny too. Only, it wasn't like that.

The director or whoever even tries to fool the viewer into believing the movie was about something else by starting the movie with Augustina walking down the street and having to rush off somewhere unknown. Then after a fight having nothing to do with the characters that were just rushing off, the scene goes to Johnny who is having the worst portrayal of post traumatic stress disorder. By worst, I mean the way it was done. There's a guy screaming loudly off screen begging to not be left by the "coward" of a protagonist "Johnny."

Now Johnny is homeless and they make that clear in a very glib way showing him wash windows and beg for money. He runs into his old friend "T" played by Adonis Williams who gives him a job at his training gym / drug front and "T" or "Tariq" also tries to get Johnny into some underground fights and into more trouble.

Here is where the theme of Johnny being a coward repeats and the movie echos that throughout until he is forced to face his fears and not run in the end so to save a random girl thrown into the mix; (minor spoiler) and by the way there is a subplot with Johnny stealing a lot of money from her and it's never confronted in the movie...anyone else hate plot holes?

The only good acting in this movie was done by Rose, who had charisma and star quality. It should have been about her character. Instead she has one line at the beginning of the film and then a fight scene in the middle. I'd say the rest was a waste of time because the story was cliché and the plot dragged... but why beat a dead horse?

If you like movies that try to have decent fight scenes you could settle for this one. But don't expect anything else.