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Credit where it’s due, for a Billy Blanks movie this one stinks far less than I’m used to. With decent production values (considering), great fight scenes and the kind of awful script that’s so bad it’s actually fun, this is a flick that you can easily doze off to without feeling yourself get too much stupider for the experience. Blanks is as terrible as ever, but he seems to know it and be cool with the fact. Merhi is also as terrible as ever, but he’s clearly long ago given up any idea that he could be anything but. This kind of confident incompetence is a rare thing in B-grade movies, and thus allows the director to just go to town with fight scenes, clichés and sex scenes – the stuff of all good B-movies. In fact, if you play the Talons of the Eagle drinking game, where you take a chug any time a fight scene, cliché or nudity arises, you may well be unconscious for the last twenty minutes of the film. And isn’t that what makes life all worthwhile?

Former Three’s Company replacement Priscilla Hughes is clearly out for a paycheck here, but her casting makes the movie that much more fun. I mean, who would you prefer in the role – the average action movie chick who can’t fight but is gorgeous (Bloodsport’s Leah Ayres) or the chick who can fight but is horrific to look at (Under The Gun’s Kathy Long), or maybe the chick who can do a little of all of the above and was in Three’s Company back when a sitcom could be masturbation material for a guy (Barnes)?

The writer of this flick, J. Stephen Maunder (Tiger Claws II and III) seems a little obsessed with getting his female characters into wet clothes – not that most viewers would complain – but he also seems to know as much about the narrative spine and mise en scene as he knows about corrective renal surgery. This story is a total mess, but who seriously watches a Billy Blanks movie for anything but butt-kicking and nudity? This one gets a passing grade, which when you think about it is probably as high a grade as a film of this nature can hope for.

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originally posted: 01/10/03 20:58:23
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