Jean-Claude Van Damme’s first lead role sends the Muscles from Brussels to Hong Kong, to compete for glory — and a big-boy sword — in a real Bloodsport. For a supposedly super-secret tournament, everyone speaks freely, openly and publicly about the kumite (pronounced koo-muh-tay), a full-contact, anything-goes competition held every five years among martial artists worldwide.

For reasons never shared, Frank Dux (Van Damme, Welcome to the Jungle) has to go AWOL from his U.S. Army post to get to the overseas contest, so he’s constantly having to evade two military cops tasked with hauling him back. Both of the cops are dumb, yet only one of them is played by Forest Whitaker (Taken 3). Ditching them proves a cinch, as does the kumite itself; Frank shatters a world record in his first-ever round. Look, Ma — nothin’ to it!

The cumulative combat scenes make Bloodsport worth the watch, as they showcase a variety of fighting styles. Amid many others, we witness one man circling his opponent like a crazed monkey; the backfiring, beer-soaked machismo of Frank’s fellow Yank (Donald Gibb, aka Revenge of the Nerds’ Ogre); and the brute intimidation of the legendary Bolo Yeung from Enter the Dragon, whose template this film flagrantly swipes. Of course, we can’t leave out Van Damme’s own patented splits or his character’s genius move: the slow-motion nut punch. That attack alone redeems the star’s (I hesitate to call him an actor) curious dress and overall appearance as every collar-popped preppy villain in every ’80s teen comedy. Like those guys, Frank succeeds in bedding the hot blonde (The Burning’s Leah Ayres, as a journalist yearning to break the kumite story).

Directed by Newt Arnold (Blood Thirst) and scripted by Sheldon Lettich (who went on to write four more Van Damme vehicles, including Double Impact), the Cannon Films hit bears the predictability of an orange-vested highway worker waving a flag to alert drivers of construction just ahead, past all those blinking lights. But, hey, those guys operating the machines are delivering kicks to the face and clenched fists to the testes! You better believe I’ll slow down for that! —Rod Lott

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The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, Takeshi “Beat” Kitano’s brilliant update of the enduring Japanese cult hero, is quite an achievement — not just for the writer/director/actor, but contemporary Asian cinema as a whole. All too often in the continent’s genre pictures, arguably even more so than America’s dumbest rock-’em-sock-’em blockbusters, the story takes such a backseat to the action — if there’s even a story for starters — that it renders itself impenetrable or invisible.

With wave-of-the-hand ease, the 2003 Zatoichi could have done the same thing, lazily relying on its target audience’s fond memories of the character as shorthand (as he has no fewer than two dozen features built around him, starting with The Tale of Zatoichi in 1962 and later followed by a popular television series). Instead, Kitano (perhaps best known on these shores as the teacher of 2000’s Battle Royale) first infused the character with a real emotional pull and then fashioned a plot around it that fits as well as a sword in its custom sheath.

More or less homeless, the aging masseur Zatoichi wanders village to village, coming upon a farming community where he settles with a kind family. He soon finds enemies, however, at the local gambling parlor. As the title reveals, Zatoichi may be blind, but wields a mean sword — as swift as it is sharp — only when he needs to. And when he does, the combat is brief — a few seconds and it’s over; no massive, Kill Bill-style set pieces as showdowns to be found here.

What really makes this Blind Swordsman adventure work with Greenwich Mean Time precision is Kitano’s utterly charming and even funny performance. He’s wholly winning. I loved the film so much that even its decision to end in a musical number failed to change my mind. Hell, it even cemented it. —Rod Lott

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Redeemer is your standard vengeance-is-mine tale with an above-average lead in Chilean fight choreographer Marko Zaror, the screen’s brightest martial artist most people don’t know about. Had he been born at the right time — say, 10 to 20 years earlier — he would have been a late-’80s action star in the ranks of Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme. As is, he’s quietly making fight flicks that have yet to catapult him beyond a cult following. Most fruitful is Zaror’s collaboration with Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, who’s directed him in four films to date, all wild and most recently the one at hand.

As the savior of the title, a heavily tattooed and soft-spoken Zaror brings a portable altar and a knack for Russian roulette with him to a coastal town that effectively shuts down after the summer season, save for the drug cartels lording over its slopes and slums. While an American hustler (Noah Segan, Looper) pulls the strings, the Redeemer’s true nemesis is the grease-slicked goon known as Scorpion (José Luís Mósca), who killed our hero’s pregnant wife.

In structure, the film is almost mockingly repetitive: The Redeemer approaches a group of bad guys, takes them down with hand-to-hand combat and swift kicks that land with a violent crunch, goes away for a bit, repeat. (We must ignore the fact that his signature hoodie would impair his peripheral vision.) Espinoza casts these sequences in his flashy, ultra-kinetic style that revels in a veritable ballet of blood spurts, yet leaves one with the belief that an essential ingredient of previous efforts was overlooked; Redeemer lacks the metaphorical punchiness of their 2007 superhero story, Mirageman, and the zip of Mandrill, that 2009 tweak of secret-agent thrillers, and soaks in the well of self-pity a few minutes too long.

Zaror isn’t that good of an actor to pull it off; physically, he’s a stick of dynamite, and that is what he’s put in front of the camera to do. More of a sense of humor, which Segan provides in his every scene, would bring Redeemer up to Zaror and Espinoza’s usual level. —Rod Lott

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One year after Romeo Must Die proved to Hollywood that, yes, that spry little Asian from Lethal Weapon 4 could put butts in seats, Jet Li followed up that success with Kiss of the Dragon. The Franco-American actioner set in gay Paree, written and produced by The Professional’s Luc Besson, is of much higher quality.

In Kiss, Li — looking vaguely like Paul “Pee-wee Herman” Reubens — is Liu Jian, a Beijing cop sent to France to help the local authorities nab a Chinese bad guy. (The reasons are cloudy, but no matter.) They set up surveillance in a swank hotel, watching the guy gets his kicks with a coked-up hooker. But when things go wrong, it’s the French inspector Richard (Tcheky Karyo, GoldenEye) who turns out to be the bad guy after all, killing the man and the ho, and setting up our pint-sized ass-kicker for the crimes.

But Richard — who screams a lot and keeps a turtle in his desk — picked the wrong Chinese man to push around. As stereotypes would expect, Liu is quite skilled in the martial arts (at one point even taking on an entire karate class at once!) and so adept at subduing his opponents with acupuncture needles that he keeps a supply of on his wrist. These work rather well — so well that I wonder why he bothered getting hit and kicked when he could have just planted his special magic pins on his antagonists’ various nerves and pressure points.

Liu is in possession of a videotape that shows Richard to be the true villain. At one point, the corrupt inspector gets this valuable piece of evidence back, only to have it stolen again because he just leaves it unlocked in his desk drawer. (Note to bad guys: Incriminating evidence is best left locked up, if not outright destroyed.) Richard also serves as a sugar daddy of sorts to ex-junkie and current street whore Jessica (Bridget Fonda, Lake Placid), who complains that she’s lucky to have five clients in a week. (This is how you know the film is fiction, as a hooker looking like Fonda would not be wanting for work. She’d be snapped up faster than the last chocolate long john at John Goodman’s family reunion.) Jessica is forced to join up with Liu to bring Richard down.

As if the whole needle angle weren’t enough of a gimmick, you also get a Scanners-esque meltdown with blood squirting out of every hole in a guy’s head, a goon getting cut in half in a laundry chute and a cute rabbit making a cannibalistic snack of a dead bunny. Insanity aside, Kiss of the Dragon is well worth seeing because of the sheer visceral pleasure of the fight scenes. The film has an annoying habit, however, of pumping some loud rap song whenever dudes start to tussle. As if the sloppy direction by Chris Nahon (Blood: The Last Vampire) and too-quick editing weren’t distracting enough, this is one trend I’d like to see nixed.

When it’s all said and done, Kiss of the Dragon can’t measure up to Black Mask (Li’s 1996 superhero kick-’em-up released to U.S. theaters in ’99 to capitalize on Lethal Weapon 4), but it’s a fine, fun hark back to the simple pleasures of kung-fu yesteryear. —Rod Lott

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To grant Golden Needles the alternate title of Mitchell Goes to the Orient — as a friend of mine did — is not out of line, even if Mitchell was a year away from its messy birth. This half-baked adventure presents star Joe Don Baker (Walking Tall) in the same vein: overweight, unkempt, presumably sweaty, kinda dumb and yet somehow wholly desirable to women out of his league. Imagine the guy who runs your grocery store’s produce department strutting around like he were George Clooney, and that’s Baker as Mitchell Dan.

The Golden Needles of the title refer not to what viewers will want to stab into their eyes upon the requisite sex scene, but the magic acupuncture statue that damn near everyone wishes to acquire. An American woman named Felicity (Elizabeth Ashley, Coma) attempts to buy the stolen statue in Hong Kong, but her offer is turned down. Her solution is to hire Dan, whom she just met at a brothel, to steal it for her. “That must be a bell-ringer of a statue,” he says.

Damn straight it is! If its needles are placed in the proper order, it grants “sexual vigor” to the poked! Although supposedly retired, Dan agrees if Felicity will hug him and say “I love you” to him right then and there. Dan has mommy issues, so Lord knows why the refined Felicity decides to sleep with him. He kisses as if her face were a roast beef platter; fittingly, their postcoital activity is stuffing themselves with seafood. You’ll swear off seafood.

Golden Needles is an action movie, although one might forget that fact while watching. It has two fun chases — one through a health spa; the other, a shipyard — and the brief moments that Jim Kelly (Black Belt Jones) is onscreen busting out kung-fu moves are blessed ones. While watching the Hulk-esque act of Baker throwing Asians through plate glass never gets old, the movie does. That Robert Clouse went from the martial-arts classic Enter the Dragon to this obscurity in less than a year says more about the talent of Bruce Lee. —Rod Lott

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