Admits Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character several times within the opening minutes of Wake of Death, “I’m tired.” Dude, we’ve noticed.

Van Damme’s Ben Archer is former mob muscle gone legit, now a club bouncer, loving father and devoted husband. His wife, Cynthia (Lisa King, Love N’ Dancing), is a cop who, upon discovering a boat of Asian refugees at the harbor, bring a scared young girl home for the night, as if test-driving a puppy from the pound. Unfortunately, 14-year-old Kim (Valerie Tian, 2012’s 21 Jump Street) is no ordinary refugee; she’s on the run from her father, who unfortunately is Triad crime boss Sun Quan (Simon Yam), who unfortunately slit his wife’s throat post-coitally as Kim unfortunately watched.

“I’m going to get Kim back my way,” says Quan, and boy, does he try, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake — a wake of death, one might say — including Cynthia’s. As you’d expect, that leaves Archer in reluctant but devoted charge of Kim, protecting her from own father. It’s not unlike Boaz Yakin’s Safe, the 2012 movie in which Jason Statham also protects a young Chinese girl from the Triad while also taking revenge on the goons who murdered his spouse. The difference is Safe is far smarter and better made, but it’s not like Wake of Death didn’t have a chance.

Shot in South Africa, the cheap actioner has four credited writers and went through three directors, the first being Hong Kong great Ringo Lam, reuniting with Yam after Full Contact and with Van Damme after three films, including Maximum Risk. Lam walked after a couple of weeks, so who knows which scenes are his; my guess is the film’s best: a motorcycle chase through a shopping mall, including up the escalators and jumping from level to level. A sequence as bravura as that rises above Wake’s other set pieces, which are so poorly staged and edited that the viewer is never given the chance to invest oneself. Since Philippe Martinez (The Chaos Experiment) holds the directorial credit and also produced, we can pin the failure on him.

Van Damme himself is fine. Ironically, the further time removes him from his box-office heyday, the better an actor he becomes. Every now and again, one of his DVD premieres pops with some acclaim — like 2008’s JCVD and 2012’s Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning — but not enough to fuel a career comeback. Wake of Death isn’t one of those standouts, lumbering with so many slow-motion shots and needless scenes — like watching Yam practicing tai chi for a hot minute — that the running time keeps calling attention to its own padding. —Rod Lott

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While the Rocky films are typically considered to be the Rolls Royce of boxing pictures, the Penitentiary flicks have always been more of a twice-used Ford Festiva: Sure, it might have plenty of scuffs and dents all over, but it gets great gas mileage and the insurance is cheap, too. I like both, but I’d rather drive to 7-Eleven in a Festiva.

This comparison reaches an apex with the first sequel, Penitentiary II. We find Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone (Leon Isaac Kennedy) fresh out of the hud and making love to all the sweet ladies who have missed him, including a very special one he meets at a roller-skating park. Unfortunately, she’s killed by a gang, leaving Too Sweet to fight a rival in the penitentiary he was so desperate to leave. Helping him along the way is a bearded elderly man who loves the ladies and Mr. T, who loves the ladies two at a time while dressed as a genie in gold lamé.

Everywhere he goes, people cheer loudly for Too Sweet, including Rudy Ray Moore in a cameo on a fire escape. Here, Moore plays, of course, a “born rat soup-eating, insecure muthafucker.” I wouldn’t want it any other way. Unfortunately, Too Sweet’s family is kidnapped and Ernie Hudson — clad in a tight white T-shirt and rainbow clown wig — beats him up backstage while his family is kidnapped. Luckily, they escape with the help of their adorable son unplugging the television and with them back by his side, Too Sweet finds his will to fight and, of course, win.

Additionally, as Too Sweet wins the match, Mr. T kills Hudson in the dressing room, so … win-win?

As the credits roll, everyone — including the little-person prisoner (Tony Cox) scoring poon under the ring — cheer wildly at the camera as the credits roll. Of course, some of them will be back for Penitentiary III, released by the Cannon Group in 1987 and, sadly, is nowhere to be found on home video, no matter how hard I look.

Director Jamaa Fanaka was a bit of a cinematic odd-duck — has anyone here seen Soul Vengeance and its magic-lasso penis? — who sadly passed away in 2012, only a few films under his (probably) welterweight belt. Still, with those movies mostly like Penitentiary II, I consider it a great movie in absolutely stellar filmography, a purely dependable Festiva of film. —Louis Fowler

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Among the events crammed into the needlessly distended Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen is a fun moment in which Charlie Hunnam’s drug-trade enforcer runs afoul of — and trades blows with — a group of street thugs. Russian Raid feels like an extension of that scene into nearly two hours of its own, turning a standout bit into mere status quo. Do you want to settle for that? Nyet.

This Russian actioner’s story is somewhat less thin than its setting’s doors, which look to be made of packing material: Former military sniper Nikita (Ivan Kotik, Chinese Zodiac) takes a freelancing assignment to rob a missile factory of its riches. Reluctantly assisting him on this nighttime heist is a rowdy, ragtag pack of tracksuited hooligans with authority issues. While they target a massive safe — and even attempt its penetration via medieval battle ax — Nikita has personal reasons for retribution as well.

Justifying the assumed titular nod to Gareth Evans’ The Raid, but hardly as vertical, reaching the well-fortified bounty requires moving from room to room and level to level through the factory. Wearing a blue-striped tank top that registers as ridiculous to this side of the world, Nikita and his hired charges go to hand-to-hand combat in one skirmish after another.

While I have no doubt of the guys’ real-life fighting abilities, the choreography isn’t as supportive; in fact, it’s pretty clunky. In his first feature, writer/director/producer Denis Kryuchkov not only errs by hitting “play” on a distractingly obnoxious soundtrack when shit hits the fan, but speeds up the footage to a telling degree. Worse, he gives the camera a slight bump to punctuate the points he wants viewers to react to with a sympathetic “Oof!”

It’s so obvious, it’s Pavlovian. The overall effect is punishing, as the sequences near-instantly wear out their welcome, with a respite of flat humor or preening villainy before returning to more of the same song, different room. In a fight film, the fights are everything. And sometimes, as in Russian Raid, nothing. —Rod Lott

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While I probably would have enjoyed Guns Akimbo 20 — hell, maybe even 10 — years ago, now it seems like the kind of film I just want to end and, as sick as it is, very slowly and mostly painfully. Having seen movies like this with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Austin and, yes, even Jim Carrey, there should be a self-imposed ban on all camera-ready setups, starting with this one starring the former Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe.

Here, Radcliffe is Miles, a typical video-game nerd who, like most video-game nerds, spends most of his time shit-posting instead of, you know, playing. When he makes the all-too-easy mistake of commenting on the Skizm — ugh — boards, the guys behind this multimillion dollar site break into his house and strap guns to his hands.

Before he can say “ouch,” the No. 1 killer in the game, Nix (Samara Weaving), is heading to his apartment to blast him all to hell. Meanwhile, frequent viewers of the game sit around, stay fat and wish for the goriest of deaths upon him.

And that’s all well and good, I suppose, but, like I said, we’ve seen this trope so many times by now — many with a trademarked supposed satirical bent — what exactly is it Guns Akimbo is trying to say?

And what about the guy trying to say it, New Zealand director Jason Lei Howden? I enjoyed his previous flick, the metal-obsessed comedy Deathgasm, but here it seems as if he’s fallen into the perilous pit of a sophomore slump, the worst kind: a pointless killer fiasco that will probably cost Radcliffe more than a few jobs, all of which he’s lucky to get anyway. —Louis Fowler

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For what is the best clutch-popping, beer-guzzling, NOS-injecting, B-cup-bearing, door-breaking, bitch-punching, helicopter-dangling, car-chasing, Mercedes-thieving, school bus-jumping, foot-pursuing, gun-shooting, murder-witnessing, flight-missing, lady-snatching, jockstrap-taunting, Siamese food-eating, window-breaking, bar-brawling, pinball machine-slamming, house-exploding, tire-flying, 2×4-swinging, fist-throwing, gravity-defying, truck-revving, gas-bombing, bridge-leaping, motorcycle-riding, Riggs-and-Murtaughing stunt-stunting movie ever made, you must see Action U.S.A.!

For William Smith in aviators, diamonds on a windmill, Ross Hagen in a trenchcoat, a racist Texas sheriff, Cameron Mitchell in a Jacuzzi with two women, flambéd flunkies, Cameron Mitchell in multiple gold chains, parking garage pursuits, Cameron Mitchell on a treadmill and gratuitous use of a honky-tonk bar, you must see Action U.S.A.!

For bras, a general recognition of stop signs or an adherence to seat-belt legislation, you must see something else! But for a movie built Ford tough with a character named Billy Ray, you must see Action U.S.A.! Or you’re a goddamn Communist! —Rod Lott

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