TheRetroCritic

It's a fine line between a good thriller and a silly one but the first John Wick movie walked that line effortlessly delivering a tongue-in-cheek action flick with the perfect balance of cool and goofy. The film gave Keanu Reeves the comeback he deserved and a sequel soon followed. John Wick: Chapter 2 picks up roughly where the last film left off with John Wick facing the Russian mob in order to retrieve his beloved black Mustang. Of course, this leads to a big fight scene where John Wick goes around punching, kicking and shooting anything that moves in a parking garage before calling it even with Peter Stormare's mob boss. There's a short cameo from John Leguizamo, who played Wick's mechanic friend in the first movie, and the plot finally kicks in. This time, John Wick is forced to pay back his debt to an ex-assassin colleague when the latter blows up his entire house after Wick initially refuses to help. Pissed off but looking to quickly end this, Wick promptl

Bruce Lee not only starred in this martial arts movie from 1972 but he wrote, produced and directed it as well, not to mention he also handled the fight choreography. The Way Of The Dragon is mostly remembered for its intense climax in which Lee faces Chuck Norris in the Colosseum. The plot is pretty typical for the genre: a Chinese restaurant is struggling to bring in customers due to an intimidating gang pressuring the owner to sell to their boss by causing mayhem so Bruce Lee is called in to help get rid of the bad guys for good. Along the way, he inspires the staff to work on their Kung-Fu and the one girl is, of course, kidnapped at some point. We first meet Bruce Lee as he lands in Rome where he is instantly like a fish-out-of-water due to the language barrier and the people's odd reactions to him. It's a surprisingly awkward opening sequence as an old woman stares at him as if hypnotised and Lee orders like six soups in a restaurant by mistake, causing him to ask f

Here's the video review version of my Fist Of Legend review.

Directed by Gordon Chan, Fist Of Legend is a loose remake of Fist Of Fury in which Jet Li takes on the role of Chen Zhen, made popular in the 70's by Bruce Lee. Set during the Japanese occupation, we first meet Chen Zhen as a student who learns of his master's death and returns to his old kung-fu school to pay his respects. Soon enough, he starts to suspect foul play and a rival martial arts school causes trouble over and over. Add to that the fact that Zhen's love interest is Japanese so not exactly popular with his peers and you've got yourself a busy little movie with plenty of tension but also plenty of fighting. Li may not be as expressive or charismatic of an actor as Bruce Lee but he knows his kung-fu and the fight scenes are impressive throughout the film. Gordon Chan not only makes them look fantastic but he successfully makes them feel like timeless, iconic set-pieces. The best may very well be the fight between Zhen and Fumio Funakochi (Yasuaki Kurata)

Back in 2001, when The Matrix was still all the rage and "the One" was still Keanu Reeves, there was another "One". Jet Li, that is, in a little film called, quite simply: The One . Directed by James Wong, mostly known for his work on the Fast & Furious franchise, The One was originally meant to star The Rock (yes, when he was still known as The Rock) but, since he was busy working on The Scorpion King , Jet Li was soon cast in the main role. One year post- Romeo Must Die , Li was starting to build a solid US portfolio movie-wise and starred in this goofy sci-fi actioner also starring Jason Statham. The film introduces the idea of a multiverse, basically the existence of multiple parallel universes. In a Highlander -esque twist, if one was to kill every single version of himself throughout the universes, he would gain all their energy and, that way, become some kind of super-powerful being. Which is why Yulaw, evil Jet Li, travels from dimension to dimen

Having missed most of the Donnie Yen craze ( Ip Man and all that), I went into Dragon expecting something conventional, a typical martial-arts flick with a straight-forward plot and loads of floating and kicking. Dragon is most definitely not something conventional. It's also not about dragons. Instead, here we have Donnie Yen playing a rather dodgy character who is being investigated by Takeshi Kaneshiro, who's basically Sherlock Holmes in this. The story kicks off with Donnie Yen defending an old man from two machete-wielding robbers, he kicks their ass but without really doing anything and in the end, one of them is killed. Self-defence or not, Kaneshiro's sleuth doesn't buy Yen as a simple fisherman and starts to dig deeper and deeper into what actually happened, focusing on details, Yen's past etc. It's gripping stuff and it works as a Holmes mystery because you're really not sure where the movie is going for most of it, what's truth, wha