Kickboxer: Retaliation [2018]

A long time ago we watched "Kickboxer," the movie where Van Damme learns to kickbox to get revenge for his brother being paralyzed in Thailand. In his own time Adam has been watching through the entire "Kickboxer" series, which stops featuring Van Damme and eventually got rebooted. The seventh movie, called "Kickboxer: Retaliation," was the one he deemed most worthy of a rewatch.

The movie starts with a perfume commercial of an opening where a man and woman dance in a fancy train car before the woman is kidnapped and the man has to fight a bunch of NPCs. This may have been a dream, it's unclear, but in reality he is a famous fighter who is kidnapped and thrown into a Thai prison that's basically a fight club. Why? Apparently he killed someone in a previous film and now they want him to fight his huge bear (as Erik dubbed him). When he refuses, he goes to prison where he meets Mike Tyson and Van Damme, now playing a different character who's blind and here to train him. Main character decides to do the fight after they kidnap his wife, the dancing lady from the intro. At one point the wife gets punched and sent to the hospital, but she's okay. Then the main guy fights the bear since he already agreed to do it. He wins. The end.

There's a lot of what including:

• A newspaper called "Nation International"
• A "Bad to the Bone" rip off blues song during a long fight sequence
• Words in subtitles being different colors and in bold for no reason
• Rapid fire cuts
• The crowd shouting "white warrior" to the main even though the bear is white too.
• The wife injecting the main with a mysterious syringe to wake up during the right.

So how was it? It was okay. It had some laughs, but it was definitely too long at over an hour and a half. I would recommend the first few minutes and a YouTube video of the dance they do before a Muay Thai match that was completely left out of this so-accurate film.

Spoon Rating: 4