By Geno McGahee
“Eight years for stealing a sausage?!” – David (Sasha Mitchell)
Recently I watched KICKBOXER 2: THE ROAD BACK, a straight to video follow up to the Jean-Claude Van Damme classic. They replaced JCVD with Sasha Mitchell, a man that cannot act, but in fairness to the sequel, it wasn’t really that bad. It wasn’t great, but for a straight to video action film, it had its moments. So, maybe I was foolish to be a little optimistic about the 1992 third entry of this series, KICKBOXER 3: THE ART OF WAR, a wretched film that I suffered through.
David (Sasha Mitchell) and his trainer Xian (Dennis Chan) travel to Rio de Janeiro to take on some bad boy in an exhibition match. Mitchell’s acting is atrocious as he jokes with Xian on the plane. They land and David immediately encounters some criminals and beats the shit out of them. Now, following the trend set in the second, they put an annoying “tough guy” kid in this and he follows David around the entire film. I hated this kid. Marcos (Noah Verduzco) steals David’s camera but soon becomes his friend along with his sister, Isabella (Alethea Miranda).
Lane (Richard Comar) befriends the group and is the promoter of the kickboxing match and represents the opponent. He throws out the idea of David throwing the fight for half of a million dollars. Disgusted, David storms off and Xian follows, but there is more to Lane. He runs a sex slave brothel. Hey, why not? If you’re going to make a villain, fixing fights is just not enough. He has to whore out underage women too. I think this is a good move by the filmmakers. It’s hard to root for Sasha Mitchell, but if the bad guy is really really bad, maybe you’ll cheer for him. I still was cheering “LANE! LANE! LANE!”
Isabella becomes the newest sexual slave for Lane and that leads to a showdown with David, Xian, and even Marcos, taking on a bunch of goons with guns. This turns into a ridiculous action movie with David shooting all the bad guys and confronting Lane. David gets captured and must now train Lane’s way. He really abuses him, trying to soften him up for the fight with his fighter so he can make a bundle of money. He pushes him into the ocean, puts rocks in his backpack and makes him run a lot…or the girl dies! David follows Xian’s advice and puts his brain in another place so he can do it…but what I don’t understand here is that Lane walks alongside Xian over and over again and talks with him. Xian is a master of fighting and could kill Lane in two seconds. He never makes a move. He just keeps asking him “why do you do this.” Xian may just be a prick.
KICKBOXER 3: THE ART OF WAR is terrible even by Sasha Mitchell standards. The story is lame, the acting is terrible and the movie moves along at a snail’s pace. I get a feeling that this wasn’t a KICKBOXER movie…it was written to be something else and they just molded it to fit into the series. The second one was bad, but this one is nearly unwatchable. This is one to avoid. What’s good or bad is that there is another one in the series. KICKBOXER 4: THE AGGRESSOR is next on my agenda. It has to be better than this.
Rating: 1/10
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