To the Death

A kickboxer retires at the top of his game and turns down a lucrative fight deal with a shady kickboxer promoter who kills the losers of his matches. Then the boxer's wife is blown up. Who might have done it? Hm. That seems pretty obvious. The kickboxer, rather than find out who killed his wife, becomes a drunk. The promoter pulls him out of the gutter and makes the same offer which he now accepts, for some reason. Include in the mix his the promoter's coke-whore girlfriend.

This movie is a mess. All of the clichés you'd expect are here. Even the MC of the matches, dressed up like Joel Grey in Cabaret, seems pretentious and boring.

This film was really poorly done. Now, movies like "To the Death" have a charm, and that is that they are not your typical Hollywoodesque martial arts films. However, there is a limit, and this film had almost nothing going for it. The good news is that Michel Qissi has a role, and is a pretty good on camera fighter. I hope he makes some more movies (Kickboxer is one of my all time favourites). The rest was done poorly. The love interest was not as pretty as one might expect, and the evil fighters in the underground really didn't look so tough. A referee? Give me a break. And what's with the way the "losers" of the bouts meet their doom? The gun thing is a cop out, what ever happened to the "you kill your opponent with your own hands idea"? I wasn't moved at all, the choreography was done by Qissi,he was good, but everyone else was mediocre. I don't just want to see wild punches and ordinary run of the mill kicks, although they may be perfectly executed. I want aesthetically pleasing moves that are well thought out. In short, this film just doesn't cut it.

John Barrett returns as Quinn, the kickboxing champion from American Kickboxer 1 who joins forces with his main rival Jacque Denard (Qissi) to squash the promoter (Whitehead) of death matches who also is responsible for the car bombing of Quinn's wife. Much kickboxing and overwrought melodrama ensues. It's hard to believe that the martial arts genre is almost now completely dead in 2019. To The Death for all it's glory is a fairly uninspired effort as far as these things go, with mediocre action, a basic competence to the filmmaking and overblown soap opera elements as Barrett starts to fall for the promoter's co-dependent wife, a subplot which halts what little momentum this predictable potboiler builds. The acting is a cut above what usually one gets from the genre, as Whitehead is satisfactory as the villain, while Barrett is a likable enough presence but no one watches this for thespian development and what is ultimately needed is excellent martial arts sequences, and while such is adequate, To The Death just isn't very exciting. Movies like this can be fun when there is Bad Movie charm, energetic fight sequences and a sense of cheesy absurdity to liven up the story's repetition. However they don't when everything is done in a workmanlike by the numbers and utterly generic way. To The Death then perfectly represents what killed a genre at a time when American martial arts movies we're in their final death throes. Even for fans of the genre there is nothing here good or bad that stands out as memorable. Basically it's what you would expect with little variation on such,the type of movie you watch when the only other option is CNN or a paid advertisement.

*1/2 Out Of 4-(Poor)