Shadow Fury (2002)

Powerful

It is a performances centric movie

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The film concerns a near future when the World Health Organization prohibits globally on all human cloning . However a discovery creates genetically engineered . Nova Corporation hires to Madsen (Sam Bottoms), a tough bounty hunter with bad liver . He sets off in pursuit Takeru (Funaki) , a perfect ninja clone with extraordinary strength and agility . He has been created by a scientist named Dr Oh(Pat Morita) , Madsen must destroy Oh's lab about replication of enhanced human beings and any clones and the killer Ninja . But the laboratory explodes and Tareku on the loose . Madsen is helped by the lovely Dr. Foster (Alexandra Kemp) and taking on another Doctor who is developing the Alpha phase project containing 256 live specimen failed prototypes with physical deformation and mental incapacitation . The Doctor creates a new perfect killing machine , as disposal required , a teen named Kismet, a miraculous advance in slickness and intelligence . Meanwhile , a gunrunner (Fred Williamson) hands over Madsen weapons and Ninja arms such as Shuriken and Katana . The picture is a low budget actioner with suspense , spectacular fights , and crude violence . The movie displays nice choreographic struggles with punches and kicks and sensational bounds and leaps by the killer Ninja . Wooden acting by Sam Bottoms, an actor whose career began splendidly (Apocalypse now , Bronco Billy) but failed , continuing with television movies ; plus , Alexandra Kemp , a German actress playing several B films (Sumuru , Dracula 3000 , Space travesty) , furthermore Noriyuki Pat (Pat Morita of Karate Kid, recently deceased) , Fred Williamson , a Blaxploitation King and a child played Taylor Lautner . The motion picture was regularly directed by Yokoyama , an usual stunts coordinator and habitual director of Power Rangers episodes . Rating : Mediocre but some moments result to be entertaining.

It was so bad it was hilarious. The bad guy originally tries to kill this girl and by accident he kills his own girlfriend and then he becomes best friends with the girl he wanted to kill in the first place. The bad guy turns into a good guy who was blown up, stabbed, shot & hand grenaded. He still lived to kill himself with a sword that he had lost in the middle of the battle and then grew other swords out of his pocket or wherever. The whole movie was about a bunch of alcoholics with no good livers to go around. The good guy couldn't kill the bad guy shooting him or stabbing him all over but he killed him when he stabbed his FOOT. We laughed thru the whole very dramatic/action movie.

Why did I rent this, you ask? I was hoping for a new martial arts hero. Boy, was I wrong! There are not enough words in the great American thesaurus for me to describe how dreadful this was. Acting was worse than a pornographic film and the action was lame. I suffered through the 90 minute, straight-to-video release and almost threw the disc out my window! Guess I'll be sticking to Chan & Li for the time being.

In the beginning of the story, it reminds me about the movie Karate Kid, because of Pat Morita. He died so soon in the movie. There are lots of scene that are not so convincing. In times that Madsen, the bounty hunter, was already down and helpless, Takero, who has the opportunity to kill the man who killed his creator, just walked away. Anyway, Takero's reluctant to kill Madsen is one of the factor that lead them to battle Kismet. 7/10