Set 18 months after the events of Kickboxer: Vengeance, Kickboxer: Retaliation sees Kurt Sloane fighting MMA, having vowed to never return to Thailand. Of course this doesn’t work out, and he finds himself kidnapped and imprisoned near Bangkok.
Manipulated into taking another fight to the death against a drug fuelled, man mountain (literally, he’s played by Hafjor Bjornsson aka The Mountain from Game of Thrones) called Mongkut in order to win his freedom he has to rely on his prison based training team. Played by a cast of real life fighters and strongmen including Mike Tyson, Big Country Nelson and Fabricio Verdum its quite fun playing spot the cameo during the film, and luckily Durant (Jean Claude Van Damme) has also been imprisoned in the same jail, so he’s around to take on the head trainer roll and get Kurt ready to fight to the death.
I wasn’t a massive fan of the first revival of the Kickboxer film, it felt exaggerated, over the top and including Van Damme as a different character to his original role as Kurt makes the whole thing feel like some sort of sequel instead of a remake. Unfortunately I don’t think the sequel to the remake is any better, with an excessive, over the top plot line and basically no character development – I didn’t feel like I could get behind the characters and wasn’t worried about what happened to Kurt in the standard grand finale.
If you want a film featuring mindless martial arts and not much else, this is ideal for you.
“You interrupted my meditation”
– Briggs, played by Mike Tyson, before demonstrating how calm meditation makes him by fighting Kurt
Our Rating
2 stars out of 5
Awesome review!