The best Kickboxer movie yet! Which isn’t saying a whole lot.
David and Xian are in Rio for an exhibition match. A couple of kids end up snatching David’s camera in a typical tourist setup. Camera on the table, one kid comes and tries to sell you something, makes a scene by knocking something over. While you’re distracted, another kid swoops in and steals the camera and is long gone before you can react. Unless you’re David Sloane. Then you chase the kid down through Rio’s favelas, beat up two adult thugs, get your camera back, feed the kids and befriend them.
It’s refreshing that the locals aren’t the bad-guys in this film. In the previous two films it’s been very tilted towards the Thai people being untrustworthy and dangerous. In this one, the “bad guy” is an American who traffics young women, thinking he’s saving them from street life.
David and Xian even manage to befriend a cop in the process.
Tong Po is only mentioned very briefly and is not part of the plot at all, which is also refreshing.
There is still a fight, but the main theme of the movie is to take down the bad guy.
I would have liked more Rio scenery to have been included. There was a must-have helicopter shot of Christ the Redeemer, which I assume they purchased from Rio’s tourism authority because it has a distinctly different image quality.
I didn’t think I’d be back so soon, but plan changes this afternoon gave me some free time to squander. And what better way than by watching a film.
I should have picked a better film. But plans are plans and Kickboxer 2: The Road Back was next in line after Kickboxer.
It’s hard to imagine a more one dimensional film than the first Kickboxer, but it had a couple of things going for it that this sequel absolutely does not.
The original Kickboxer had JCVD. I thought he was in this second one too, but this one only features the original Sloan brothers as brief newspaper clippings at the beginning of the film, and they earn a couple of brief mentions throughout the film. The main character in Kickboxer 2 is the hitherto secret third Sloan brother, and his douchebag sparring partner and friend.
The original Kickboxer also had some footage in Thaliand with some nice wats. This one is set in bleak LA, with most of the footage being inside a gym or fighting arena.
The final fight scene isn’t set anywhere impressive like the original fight between Kurt and Tong Po. It’s in an empty arena, being filmed, if I’ve understood it correctly, to broadcast for the underground fight scene in Thailand where Tong Po is going to kill the final Sloan brother. (Spoiler: he doesn’t).
The decision to show nearly all of the final fight scene in slow motion sucks. The lighting sucks. The film stock sucks. The audio sucks. The story sucks.
The only good bit about this movie, really, is Brian Austin Green who is in it for about a minute at the beginning of the film as the kid who doubts David Sloane’s abilities.
I have distinct memories of going to the video rental place in Höganäs as a kid. The pinball machines that I adored were there, and I got to play a few rounds with dad. But there was also this promo for Kickboxer as a larger-than-life-size cutout. I thought it was the coolest looking thing ever. I was 9.
A few years later, we’d moved to Australia. Sitting with older friends on the couch in their livingroom they suggested we watch Kickboxer. I think I would have been 12 or 13 maybe. I don’t remember much of the movie itself from that time, other than that I definitely thought I wasn’t old enough to watch it and was surprised no adults intervened.
Many many years later (33?) this poster popped into my mind again and I decided to pull down a copy to watch. And then I checked if there are any sequels. There are 6 of them!
Kickboxer (1989) Kickboxer 2: The Boxening Road Back (1991) Kickboxer 3: The Art of War (1992) Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor (1994) The Redemption: Kickboxer 5 (1995)
Then a significant gap. Maybe enough for it to be a reboot, I’m not sure, but I’m looking forward to finding out! I’m not hitting up IMDB for details. I’m just going to go in blind. The last two are:
Kickboxer doesn’t pass any of the tests. It doesn’t get close to passing the Bechdel. It uses sexual violence as a plot device. Americans come in blasing guns and firing grenades. Thai people are portrayed either as untrustworthy and ruthless, or as mystical and spiritual.
So, in short, the film is shit. The fight scenes are dreadfully choreographed. The combination punches are worthy of an Austin Powers or Naked Gun movie. The characters are shallow and one dimensional (except JCVD’s muscles – they are definitely not one dimensional).
It definitely feels like the fight-choreography was done to maximise JCVD’s bodybuilding poses. These aren’t the best examples of this, but it was the best I could with image search.
There are a couple of good things about the film.
The film grain is delicious in the dim lighting. It was shot on 35mm and it shows. The lighting in the final fight sequence is also really good.
Oddly, it’s better than I thought it would be. There were a lot of things that I didn’t get as a 12 year old.
There’s a weird bug in Ubuntu 24.04 where some windows cannot be resized if you’ve got your system set to automatically log in when you boot up the computer.
Odd.
If you log out and log back in, everything works fine again. But I don’t want to have to do that. So I delved into shortcuts and turns out in Ubuntu’s GUI, Gnome, if you hold down the Super-key (Windows-key on a Windows-themed keyboard) and drag the edge of the window with a mousewheel click (or middle-click if you’re still rocking a 3-button mouse) you can resize the window in either direction.
I have a GoPro Hero4 Session. This little camera was amazing when it came out. I still think it’s still pretty amazing today. (Aside from one annoyance: I can’t get Quik to connect to it from my Android phone because it insists that there’s a PIN set on it.) It does what I want it to do. Takes half decent action videos in 1080p at 50Hz and wide-angled quite average stills. In good light the photos are pretty usable as happy snaps. It’s waterproof without needing a case. And it comes with all manner of mounts. It’s currently being used on the front of my bike to capture any excitement that might happen as I ride around the place.
But where it falls over completely is file naming convention. Videos start off with a perfectly fine “GOPR6014.mp4” format. The 6,014th photo or video shot on the camera. Perfect. But then, when that video gets to the filesize limit, it creates a second file with the name GP016014.mp4. And the next file it creates is GP026014.mp4.
This means that when you sort the files by name, you get a list of all of the second files for the videos, then third files for the videos, then fourth, etc., until you get to a list of all the base files.
It’s horrible and makes a mess of any storyboarding file editing software you can imagine. (Unless there are ones out there that will accept this horrid GoPro standard that I’ve not yet found).
import os
import re
# Get all files in the current directory and skip directories
for filename in os.listdir('.'):
if not os.path.isfile(filename):
continue
name, ext = os.path.splitext(filename)
# Rename GOPR files: GOPR6014.mp4 → 6014-00.mp4
if name.startswith("GOPR"):
new_name = name[4:] + "-00" + ext
os.rename(filename, new_name)
print(f"Renamed {filename} → {new_name}")
# Rename GP files: GP016015.mp4 → 6015-01.mp4
elif name.startswith("GP"):
match = re.match(r"GP(\d{2})(\d+)", name)
if match:
suffix = match.group(1)
main_number = match.group(2)
new_name = f"{main_number}-{suffix}{ext}"
os.rename(filename, new_name)
print(f"Renamed {filename} → {new_name}")
This takes all the files in the directory that you launch the script from and renames them into a more sensible structure.
GOPR6014.mp4 becomes 6014-00.mp4. GP016014.mp4 becomes 6014-01.mp4. GP026014.mp4 becomes 6014-02.mp4. and so on.
This now sorts properly, and makes life much easier.
Enjoy.
Test this before you use it on something important.
