Capital Punishment (1991)

A Masterpiece!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I picked up this movie because, every now and then, I enjoy watching the bad martial arts films that came out of the 1980s and 1990s. This is definitely one of those films, with a typical story line, bad cinematography, tons of shots that look like stock footage that have nothing to do with the rest of the movie, and the expected over acting.If you are going to watch this for the martial arts, this is not a very good movie. All of the martial art scenes are very slow and they appear to be very contrived. The one thing that I was surprised about is that a young, very hot Scott Shaw appears in this film as the bad guy cohort of David Carradine. At least for me, that made this movie worth the watch.

I just can't believe that it's possible to make martial arts movies as bad as this one. This is a great example for all future filmmakers how things should not be done. First, let talk about the fight scenes. Before watching this movie, I knew that it would be fighting almost non-stop from beginning to end. Great, I thought. The only problem is that the fight scenes just stink way beyond imagination. They were both slow and totally unspectacular, and I almost fell asleep watching.And now for the story (or lack of story). During this movie, I had huge problems in figuring out what was going on. Things just didn't make any sense at all, and I guess it's a new world record when it comes to plot holes (Calling them plot holes is way to good of a description though, since this movie really doesn't have a plot at all). And then, you could add David Carradine's worst part in a movie ever (maybe), and the same for Gary Daniels. I sure hope they have forgotten about this maximum piece of junk a long time ago.

This movie has a plot; a drug was manufactured for the purpose of improving food genetically but was found to cause birth defects and therefore was made illegal for use, it is highly addictive and very cheap to make. Thayer(Gary Daniels) was set up by a corrupt police detective to stage a fake death in the ring of his opponent while kick boxing, then they made it appear he really did kill his opponent. He has to run from the cops as well as the drug dealing Japanese gang led by his former sensai. His goal is to stop the shipment of drugs as well as put a stop to the gang. He must battle many villains including his former sensai in an epic match. Decent but somewhat complex plot the bad thing about this movie is the fight scenes are very sluggish at most times and the overall filming quality is horrible. This seems to be a low budget B movie, it is an OK movie but it would not be my first choice to buy. Almost any karate or kick boxing movie tops this as far as fight scenes go, this movie is at times hard to take seriously and is at times laughable with its slow fight scenes.

Sure, this movie is low budget, but that doesn't mean it's no good. Gary Daniels is likable in one of his early staring roles. The fighting is almost non-stop from beginning to end. Don't expect Jackie Chan like perfection though. Don't expect oscar calibre acting either. But, most martial arts movie fans will almost definitely like it. I know I did. Also, the training sequence before the kick-boxing match is awesome!