On a good day, "Blackbelt II" would get two stars instead of one. The film has some B-movie charm to it and, realistically, isn't the worst you can go when it comes to low-budget action pictures. Today, however, is a bad day for me, and the technical laziness and storyline hodgery of supposed kickboxing champion Blake Bahner's guns & karate vehicle weigh in on my nerves enough that I don't feel very generous. Chances are you've never heard of this movie before, and so with good reason: there is nothing special about the film and nothing can be gained by watching it.
The story: when the partner of renegade LA cop Brad Spyder (Bahner,
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2) is murdered while investigating the reappearance of his thought-dead Vietnam veteran brother in Hawaii, he makes it his mission to find out what happened, and discovers a deadly crime syndicate trying to swindle money out of a desperate grieving father (Paul Holme, "Stairway to Heaven")...
The meat of the plot is that this syndicate (led by no-namers Gary "Skinner" Rooney and Michael "Friedkin" Vlastas) has promised the aforementioned father the return of his son, who went missing in Vietnam, but plan to trick him with the false testament of a fake POW (the brother of Spyder's partner) before stealing his money. The idea's farfetched but has some potential, but it's presented in such a convoluted manner that few viewers will be troubled to continue to follow it's development after the first half-hour. There's a political half-statement regarding the expendability of soldiers and the putting forth of the conspiracy theory that, when too many soldiers deserted the military in `Nam, they were declared MIA to cover up the embarrassment; whether or not this can be considered offensive is up to you.
However, what kills the movie dead is its poor production. Far too many scenes are shot under dark lighting and have a bleak, washed-out look that makes this 1993 film seem like it was made in 1980. Expect incorrectly-synched sound effects galore. Worse still is the movie's atrocious editing, which not only cuts each and every shot half a second too early but also denies the film any ebb or flow via chronic inconsistencies in the positioning of characters and a general lack of comprehensible pace. This carries over to the action scenes - the movie's last, failed chance at any cinematic worth. A combination of bloody-but-unremarkable shootouts and worthless fistfights disappoints something awful. Blake Bahner has some decent kicks and more or less looks the part of the next Van Damme-wannabe, but save for so-so brawl he has with Gary Rooney at the end of the picture, the four fights either make dreadful overuse of the "many shots, one strike, quick edit" technique or are simply presented so lifelessly and without intrigue that it's very difficult to care who wins.
With the exception of "the jolly evil fat man of Filipino exploitation cinema" Vic Diaz (
Live by the Fist), the cast is made up almost exclusively of bit-players and the acting is roundly questionable. The subliminal weirdness of how the story plays out and how the movie was stitched and slapped together might ultimately appeal to hardcore C-movie lovers, but I think it says something that even a simple action fan like me found nothing to like about "Blackbelt II". Rest assured, it has no connection beyond its title with
the original Don Wilson outing - therein eliminating its final glimmer of possible intrigue. Continue to ignore this movie; it might as well not even exist.
