| Showdown In Little Tokyo (1991) Cast:Dolph Lundgren,Brandon Lee,Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa.Tia Carrere,Toshira Obata Dolph Lundgren as a dedicated cop who teams up with Brandon Lee , together they hang tough with a group of Japanese thugs who are terrorizing Little Tokyo, the leader is responsible for the murder of Lundgren's parents and of course Lundgren swears revenge, The pressure is upped when Lundgren's girlfriend (Carrere) is kidnapped. Now Keller and Murata must stop the Yakuza in this extremely disappointing actioner. At first glance one would expect a movie with both Dolph Lundgren and Brandon Lee to kick serious ass, unfortunately Showdown In Little Tokyo is far too stupid, not to mention unexciting to really be enjoyable. It's one of those movies where it can show a sex and beheading and then move on as if it hadn't happened. The plot itself is extremely poor. The movie itself seems to be just two cops vs disposable Japanese bad guys, never does Lundgren and Lee ever call in for backup even when they are severely outnumbered, however the fact that Lundgren and Lee are depicted so tough, the audience fails to really get involved with the actionscenes because there's no sense of anything at stake. Plus afterawhile things just get ridiculous, such as the scene where Lundgren turns over a car, shields himself from bullets by using a wooden table and of course jumps over a car without any trouble. Naturally this makes Lundgren practically invincible. The villains themselves played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Al Leung and Toshiro Obata don't get a chance to even develop any character, they are simply hateful bastards. Sure it may seem as if I'm taking things a tad too seriously, but the actionscenes themselves are so far outside reality, that one can't even hope to get excited here. Plus the story is very poorly written, such as why Lundgren's parents were murdered in the first place, why? The movie doesn't care, it's simply an excercise in mindless action. Unfortunately on those lowly terms Showdown In Little Tokyo fails because it makes the heroes far too macho and invincible. So what we have here is an action movie with no fun action to depict. Sure a few interesting touches are there, but Showdown In Little Tokyo is too sloppy and moronic to recommend to anyone except die hard fans of the stars and even they maybe disappointed. .D.Mark L. Lester *1/2 |