Kickboxer: Vengeance was a very pleasant surprise. Remakes aren't always a good idea, but the new take on the Van Damme martial arts classic turned out way better than it had any right to. It wasn't perfect, but Alain Moussi made a likeable lead, the action scenes were well-executed and the closing three-round battle was spectacular. That climactic brawl was so good it elevated the entire film and made it into a minor triumph of the B-Movie world.
Fast forward two years and we get the sequel. Alain Moussi returns as Kurt Sloane, now enjoying a career as a pro-MMA fighter and deeply in love with his wife. Faster than you can say "what was up with that dream sequence," he gets kidnapped and sent to Thailand, where Christopher Lambert's villainous Thomas Moore wants him to fight his champion; 400 pound monster Mongkut.
First things first, this isn't as good as the previous film. This is partly down to the choice of bad guy; Mongkut is huge, terrifying and absolutely towers over the hero. Kurt looks like he stands no chance, but that was the case with Tong Po as well. When they cross swords at the finale, the fight plays out in an overly familiar way, matching the beats of the previous film way too closely. Kurt took a remarkable amount of punishment first time round, but here the mauling he takes is utterly absurd. The fight is entertaining, but it re-treads familiar ground, wildly stretches credibility and isn't the nail-biting pulse-racer it was before. Your mind wanders and you may even start wishing Tong Po was still around to fight Mongkut instead.
On the other hand, Retaliation does enough to justify its existence. Van Damme returns as Kurt's trainer Durand and the Muscles is clearly having a great time again. There's a highly enjoyable extended cameo from Mike Tyson, not to mention a single take prison fight that steals the entire film. There's a couple of weird stylistic flourishes in here too that you wouldn't get in the average B-Movie, such as a surreal Hall Of Mirrors fight with two lingerie models and a sequence on a train that resembles a martial arts movie filmed like a fragrance advert.
Ultimately, Kickboxer: Retaliation is worth a watch but if you were blown away by the previous one, don't expect the same thing to happen this time. Moussi continues to defy gravity, but copying and pasting the previous film's climax was a mistake. He's already knocked down one Mountain after all. And the repeated suggestion that he's foreseen all this in a dream was a big mistake.
