Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor

1994, 1080hd

Johnny's comments:

I hadn't watched any of the Kickboxer series, so starting at the fourth one seems a bad place to start but honestly this movie seems like a total standalone sequel. Van Damme is long gone but his character's brother David has picked up the slack, played by Sasha Mitchell, who I only knew as the doofus from Step By Step, so him being a big martial arts guy is a bit of spin.

David has been let out of jail so that he can help the DEA get his arch-nemesis Tong Po, who just so happens to be holding his wife captive. His way in is by getting himself invited to a million dollar martial arts tournament held at Tong Po's fortress, which he does with relative ease.

Well, the plot is basically pinched from Enter The Dragon but if you're going to rip something off, it might as well be from something great. That's where the similarities between the two end as Kickboxer 4 is a terrible movie, light on any decent fights and an embarrassingly limp final fight suggesting a follow-up that never eventuated (in this sense. Van Damme did return to Kickboxer recently).

There's a sleazy twenty minutes where a bunch of sex scenes happen, all bafflingly cut short, that one with the two girls could've gone another 10 minutes...

Also, most of the plot makes no sense, scenes are cut short, fights barely get started and the bad guys are pathetic, particularly Tong Po. Sasha Mitchell is remarkably surly and miserable throughout which I suppose you would be if you were trying to save your wife from your arch-nemesis, but he looks like he's been forced against his will to do this movie, possibly the producers mirroring the plot by holding a loved one hostage. There's a plot point where it's suggested that the bad guy would not recognise David despite being his nemesis and stealing his wife, which is so bad I can't believe someone didn't nix it at the writing stage let alone leave it in the final cut. But then I wouldn't expect anything less from director Albert Pyun, who's has so many terrible movies to his name.

Haha, I just looked it up and Pyun and Mitchell are about to make another Kickboxer movie, 25 years after this one, bafflingly in Algiers (also some more Cyborg movies, geez, the shit never ends).

Jill Pierce film clip (collage below)

two unidentified women film clip (sample below)