WEIRD STORYLINE

Well, the movie isn't all that bad, if one wants an action movie following in the steps of the flood of cheap VHS fodder from the 1980s. However, many aspects are unconvincing and tell us more about the movie's director (or those who approved the script/subject ) and his eminently personal preoccupations that Bach flowers, color therapy, crystal healing or group therapy could help solve. In fact I just would like to know why almost every main character in the movie (the Thai/Chinese siblings; the Japanese Yakuza; the African Yamakasi etc ) is involved in some sort of interracial angle that makes all the less sense the more we ponder this is some C action movie worth of an independent circuit...if the "happy end" is the Thai girl eloping with one of the African Yamakasis, we are left speechless in front of an episode from a "teenage reality show" for the MTV generation stretching into a movie. So we get a white Yamakasi (a mild C tier Sly Stallone clone ) who wants to set up a gym for orhpans or something in Thailand...great...I was afraid he'd raise funds to stop global warming and at least there are no bad Nazis in the movie, but we get Yakuza and Triad henchmen instead; this guy runs a competitions and selects a few Yamakasis to help: an oriental and a few African guys from Baganda that might be out of a "Paris suburbia on fire" news flash. The second unconvincing angle is that beside the many kung-fu versus karate versus capoeira versus thai boxe etc movies, this one introduces Parkour as a sort of new martial art; needless to say, David Belle's invention (Parkour) failed to make any impression and the hoped for inroads in big budget cinema never materialized. So this bunch of Yamakasi in Thailand manages to pick sandbox fights with the wrong guys and find themselves in the middle of a struggle between Yakuza and Triad lobbies. Photography is that of a hectic video clip, at times accompanied with horrible French hardcore rap/rock. Visually entertaining but otherwise painfully mediocre.

Who says I am a phony posing online because I am only a second fry cook at a burgher joint?!