Okay, I want to talk about a window of time that I think about a lot. Early 1991. The action movie landscape at that moment is genuinely stacked. Schwarzenegger is still Schwarzenegger. Seagal is fresh off Under Siege territory. Van Damme has just done Kickboxer and Death Warrant and is about to be everywhere. Chuck Norris. Dolph. The whole ecosystem. I am a kid hanging out with my buddies Glen and Matt, playing D&D in the basement, SNES Aerobiz until our eyes bleed. And when we were not doing that, watching anything our parents would let us rent from Blockbuster Video, West Coast Video, Palmer Video, Value Video, pretty much any chain we could get dropped off at. And during that time, Paramount Pictures released a martial arts film built around a guy nobody had ever heard of, featuring a fighting style most people had never seen, and somehow convinced a major studio to put it out theatrically. And the movie is legitimately great. Not great for what it is. Just great. The fights are extraordinary. The cast around the lead is loaded. And the story is absolutely solid. I have been meaning to write about this one for a long time, and here we are. I happened to just watch it on loop last week, so a lot of thoughts are on my mind, but here we go.
Here is the setup. Jeff Sanders, played by Jeff Speakman, is a construction worker living alone in Los Angeles. He is estranged from his father and his younger brother Adam, a cop, because of a violent incident when he was a teenager. The one relationship that kept him sane through all of that was Kim, a Korean antique shop owner in Koreatown, played by Mako, who served as the father figure Jeff never really had. Kim was the one who suggested Jeff enroll in Kenpo as a kid to channel his anger. It worked. Years later, Jeff finds out Kim is being squeezed by a Korean mob boss named Yung, played by James Hong, who wants to use Kim’s shop to move drugs. Jeff drives back to Koreatown to help his old friend. And that is where I will leave you, because this is one solid gem. No spoilers for this one from me.
Let’s talk about the cast. Jeff Speakman is Jeff Sanders, and I want to be honest with you. He is not a great actor. He is a great martial artist who can handle himself in front of a camera well enough to carry a film when the film is built correctly around him. And this one is. Like a movie cinema perfect storm. The fighting is so extraordinary and so frequent that the dramatic scenes barely register. He has a genuine screen presence, even if he does not have a wide range, and the scenes between him and Mako in the first act actually land. Hopefully, you will see what I see. I wish I were able to list 10 other amazing flicks that he made, but honestly, even I have a hard time finding something else to recommend. I guess I will call out The Expert, because he is not bad in it, and Jim Varney plays a character named Snake in it. Yes, Ernest P. Worrell. Okay, back to this cast. How about Mako? Do I say more? If you have seen Conan the Barbarian, Pacific Overtures, or a hundred other things, you know Mako is incapable of giving a bad performance. What is meant to be a smaller part, he brings his craft, which ups everyone’s game. Mako is Mako. Next, James Hong is Yung, the villain, and James Hong is another one of those actors who has been doing this since 1955 and never once phoned it in. You know him from Blade Runner, Big Trouble in Little China, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and roughly nine thousand other things. He is terrific here. Professor Toru Tanaka is Tanaka (love when they do that) the enforcer, and he is physically one of the most imposing presences ever put in a martial arts film. The man was a professional wrestler, six foot two, three hundred plus pounds, and he kills people in this film by head-butting them through walls. That is not a joke. That is a plot point. And also, he is Sub-Zero in the Arnold Running Man. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa plays Kai, a subordinate villain, and if that name is familiar, it is because he is Shang Tsung in the original Mortal Kombat film. Your soul is mine. LOU!!!!! Sadly, passed away this last December, and I will honor him forever. The man has made a career out of being exactly the right amount of menacing, and he does it again here. Dante Basco plays Jimmy Ho, the street kid connected to Kim, and if you know Dante Basco, you know him as Rufio in Hook. He is terrific. John Dye plays Adam, Jeff’s cop brother, and gives the thankless role of the guy whose job is to tell the hero to stop doing what you came to watch him do more than enough humanity to make you care about the estranged brother dynamic. Also passed away, but I am told he was a main character on Touched by an Angel, appearing in 188 episodes. And then there is Mariska Hargitay as Jennifer, Jeff’s childhood friend. She is barely in the film. Her role was originally much larger, and the scenes were cut before release. Which is a shame because you can feel the gap where the romantic subplot was supposed to live. You may know her as Olivia Benson from Law and Order SVU, which she has been doing since 1999, and for which she won an Emmy in 2006. She deserved more to do here. And I could name about three more Asian actors that are in this, but then this article would be forty pages.
Now the crew. The director is Mark DiSalle, and I have to tell you something sad before I go further. Mark DiSalle passed away in August 2025 at the age of seventy-nine. His death did not get the attention it deserved because word did not circulate widely for several months. But if you love this genre of film, he was absolutely foundational to it. He produced Bloodsport. He produced and directed Kickboxer. He produced Death Warrant. Three of the five most important Van Damme films of that era. And then he made The Perfect Weapon, which is his only other directing credit and which is, in my opinion, the better film. Supposingly, from what I read somewhere, he saw Speakman teach a class at a dojo in West Los Angeles and said we are building something around this. A tip of the hat to you, good sir. The screenplay is by David C. Wilson, a writer with a thin filmography but who understood exactly what the film needed to be. He also wrote Supernova and the Guy Ritchie film The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The producers are DiSalle and Pierre David, a prolific Canadian producer whose fingerprints are on everything from Scanners to The Fly II to a couple of dozen action films of this era. David was Cronenberg’s guy, so he touched, I think, at least ten of them. The music is by Gary Chang, who also did the score for Under Siege and Death Warrant, and who understood that a martial arts film needs a score that doesn’t get in the way of the actual fights. And the fight choreography is by Rick Avery, who deserves more credit than he gets. The Kenpo sequences in this film are unlike anything in any martial arts film before or since because the style itself is unlike anything else. It is fast, it is non-stop, it looks choreographed like Jackie Chan and his crew are doing it, and Speakman executes it at a level that makes you wonder why this did not make him a bigger star. Doing some research on this film, I found out that Ed Parker, the founder of American Kenpo and Speakman’s real life mentor, served as the technical advisor on the entire production. The character Master Lo in the film is modeled directly on Parker. Parker offered to play the role himself, and the producers turned him down because they did not think he was a strong enough actor, which, in retrospect, is genuinely funny. Parker died in December 1990, nine months before the film came out. He never got to see it in theaters. Sad Sad Sad
And now my favorite parts. The quotes:
“I really want to kill you, but you’re not worth it.” – Jeff
“I wonder if I could kick your ass… Wait… not just you… all three of you.” – Jeff
“Are you faster than a speeding bullet? Try it, Superman. I want you to try it. Come on… COME ON!” – Kai
“You know what your problem is? You don’t know when to stop.” – Adam
Look, Rotten Tomatoes has this at 36 percent based on twelve reviews, and I think that is meaningless. I can’t believe anyone would use that to turn off a movie, but I come from a time when the cover of the VHS box needed to catch you, and if you were lucky, the back had a solid action shot to sell it. The people who saw this film in 1991 (myself included) understood exactly what they had. It opened at number six and did fourteen million dollars against a ten million dollar budget, which sounds bad until you realize it opened the same weekend The Silence of the Lambs was in its sixth week of dominating everything in its path. That movie was in the theaters from February 91 to October of 91, think about how crazy that sounds now. This film, according to me, has only grown in reputation in the thirty-plus years since. Speakman had a three-picture deal with Paramount. The studio changed regimes, and it fell through, which is another one of the quiet tragedies of this era of action cinema, because a sequel to this film with this cast would have been something. It is available on Apple TV or Amazon Prime for the normal four bucks. If you have any love for this genre at all, this is required viewing.
Fun Facts:
- Mark DiSalle first encountered Jeff Speakman when Speakman auditioned for the lead role in Kickboxer. He did not get it. Jean-Claude Van Damme did. But DiSalle was so impressed with Speakman and with Kenpo that he tracked him down afterward and personally came to watch him teach a class at his dojo in West Los Angeles. What he saw that night was the origin of this entire film. DiSalle signed him to a three-picture deal on the spot, essentially. He was a man of his word.
- Mariska Hargitay originally had a significantly larger role, including a full romantic subplot with Speakman’s character. The scenes were cut before theatrical release. They were restored for some television airings. The film was shot, edited, and delivered in somewhere between thirty-five and forty days on a ten-million-dollar budget, which apparently baffled the executives at Paramount because they had genuinely never made a film for that little money before.
- I will end with this fun fact. So Speakman had a three-picture deal. They had a script bouncing around that was potentially going to be his next flick, but everything fell through. That script was Speed. Crazy how that stuff happens.
