Product: Showdown in Little Tokyo [VHS] (1991)
Rating: 3.0
Some Memories Need to Stay Memories
I remember seeing this when it was first released on VHS and I remember liking it quite a bit. It popped up on my radar again and I noticed all the positive user reviews. I figured" why not revisit this little gem." What was I thinking!? What a dumb flick.Now yes. I realize this is made for the martial arts fight scenes and the action in general. But jeezo peezo Batman shouldn't you at least try to write a script that makes some sense? This is barely a sketch of a plot. Dolph plays an L.A. cop who grew up in Japan and witnessed the murder of his parents at the hands of a Yakuza. Said Yakuza ends up in L.A. to build an empire on a new street drug, and who does he run into...Dolph Lundgren (go figure). Lundgren now has his umpteenth partner, Brandon Lee, and they are going to do the bad guys in.Mark Lester will never be accused of being a great director. He is strictly a meat and potatoes kind of guy and he proves it here. Very little in this movie makes any sense. There is no cleverness in their tracking down the bad guys. No "by the book" police procedure. (Don't you need to fill out some reports when you kill a crap-load of people)? It just gets dumber and dumber as you plod toward the end.Even the technical stuff is kind of sucky. Bad sound mixing and editing. The continuity isn't.....continuous. The editing in general is lousy. I don't remember much of the music so I guess that wasn't as sucky as the rest of the stuff.As is usual in these movies, the bad guys can't shoot worth a darn but the good guys can put your eye out at 50 yards. And, get this, at one point, when Dolph is being shot at, he holds up his hand to block the bullets. Yup. I can stop all kinds of bullets with my hands.The two leads do an OK job (I'm grading Dolph on the curve) and Tia Carrere is always easy on the eyes, but this movie is a mess. I should have kept it in my memories. It looked much better there.