Lion Fist is a retro martial arts tournament film from the team behind The Last Kumite, about Joe (Mathis Landwehr), an ex-con who enters an underground winner-take-all tournament for a $100,000 prize to save his sick son.
If you grew up on VHS-era kumite flicks and mostly want to see old favorites like Keith Cooke and Gary Daniels again, this one gives you that. If you want a story that holds together or actors who can carry a scene, you’ll be disappointed.
A straight-to-DVD and VOD resurgence of retro martial arts movies was inevitable. They never really disappeared, but none of the throwbacks has matched the mainstream fame of the 80s. Lion Fist chases the same high as The Last Kumite, and the plot is almost identical.
Plot. Joe walks out of prison after four years for a crime his ex-wife committed, and he tries to restart his life at a mill. Then she shows up, saying their young son has a life-threatening brain tumor. Joe saves Grandmaster Wu (Li Yanlong) from thugs in an alley, and through Wu and his daughter Mei (Julin Täubner) he learns of the tournament. Meanwhile, Joe and Mei decide to bust a drug ring run by Butch (Brice Akuesson) out of a gym, a subplot that appears out of thin air, and Butch turns out to be his ex-wife’s current boyfriend and the man he’ll face in the final.
The story is a pile of episodic vignettes that appear and disappear with no head or tail. The most ridiculous one has two amateurs trying to close a drug ring in an MMA club while two real detectives watch. That’s not police work. That’s a bad joke.
Acting. Seeing Keith Cooke is a real pleasure, and he’s still so good, which makes it sad that he never got the chance to become a real star. Here he’s an ex-con and a friend of the lead, when he could easily have played the Shaolin master. Li Yanlong, who got that role, looks unattached, and Cooke would have fit it far better. It’s a waste.
Gary Daniels and Kurt McKinney play detectives Williams and Parker in tiny roles. It was great to see Gary again after so long, and he’s the same as ever, with the same crossed-arms pose and the same strong eye contact. David Yeung is underused as well, and it looks like he can’t escape his father’s legacy of playing bad guys. Kai Fung Reick may be the most wasted of all: his skills are obvious on screen, but he gets a small role as a semifinal fighter. Cooke, Daniels, Yeung and Reick are the best things in this movie, and the film barely uses any of them.
Mathis Landwehr is wooden. Joe is painted as a saint from the first minute, there is zero emotional pull, and I never once cheered for him. Julin Täubner doesn’t fit the love interest role, and she and Landwehr have no chemistry. The romance is never earned, and the connection between the two simply isn’t there.
Directing and writing. Adams keeps the formula intact: the same tournament topic, an old-fashioned soundtrack and a training montage. The training montage is the one retro touch that works. But the tournament itself fumbles the idea. The authors tried to show different fighting styles and then barely used them, and the montage that stitches the kumite together looks strange. It kills the one thing a tournament movie must do, which is show me who these fighters are.
If The Last Kumite had Mark Derudder as its big, muscular bully, this one has Akuesson, and I have to ask why anyone would make another biggie the main fighter. A genuine MMA name like Ciryl Gane would have given the film much more marketing attention.
Stunts and fight choreography. Mike Moller handles the choreography and does his job perfectly. The fights are the one reason to stay, and this is where the talent in the cast shows. It’s a shame the story keeps getting in the way.
What failed and why. Almost everything outside the ring. The script drowns a simple tournament film in a sick-son subplot, an ex-wife, a love interest and a drug ring that has nothing to do with the rest. Meanwhile it ignores its biggest assets. Here is how I’d fix it. Cut the wife and the son. Cut the love interest. Make Keith Cooke the master, and give him a long fight with David Yeung. Put Kai Fung Reick in as the antagonist. Give Daniels and McKinney extended roles as detectives hunting dealers who use the gym as a front, and cross that with the kumite. Simple as that.
Best moments. Keith Cooke in any scene, Gary Daniels’ return, the Moller-choreographed fights and the training montage.
Impact. Lion Fist is a throwback that has the right faces and the wrong script. It had the talent to be a fun retro brawler and wasted it on a story nobody needed.
Verdict. Great fighters, a bad story and a montage that kills the kumite. This one never earned the punch, unless you came only to see Keith Cooke and Gary Daniels again.