In the area of town known as Little Tokyo, crime is orchestrated by the head of the Yakuza, Funekei Yoshida, the cruel and unstoppable boss. When two police officers find themselves with Yoshida as their common enemy, they reluctantly join forces to try and bring him down while also keeping one another alive. Murata seeks to bring in Yoshida by the book and alive but Kenner has another agenda – to get revenge for the death of his father, who Yoshida murdered many years ago. However, with his own army and an endless cruel streak, Yoshida is not that easy to take down.
Stretching a plot summary to more than a sentence was not easy for this title because really there is nothing new or specific about this film that will make it stick in the memory; indeed it is only surprising for just how derivative and silly the whole thing is. The plot is a very basic frame to continually throw our bantering “heroes” into mismatched action set pieces that are as dumb as they are noisy (ie, pretty dumb). It is never that exciting but it does have enough bangs and things blowing up to distract those who are happy with video-level entries into the genre. Plot-wise it is all nonsense and is full of stupid elements and increasingly bad dialogue.
Within this noisy stupidity the cast never really stood a chance although at least some of them do OK. Lundgren does his standard stuff and appeared to actually be asleep at times during the film and comes across a bit slow and lumbering in the action scenes. Lee is a lot better and he never seems to take it too seriously, with a constant smirk and a nice line in kicks. Carrere gets naked and looks great but really has little else to do outside of that, although I, like many other male viewers, didn’t mind all that much. Customary bad guy Tagawa is a good presence and he suits this type of thing, growling his way across the film in an unlikely and silly performance that somehow suits the film quite well.
Overall this is noisy, poorly acted, silly and very derivative throughout but it will still just about do enough to please those who dip into the late night cable channels looking for exactly this example of the video end of the action market. No good at all then but has some redeeming features and will still find a market because deep down we all like noisy, dumb action movies and they don’t come much more basic than this.
