"It's nice to see an old friend after all these years." - Joe
Joe and Frank reunite to stop deadly assassins.
Starring: Mathew Karedas, Mark Frazer, Kayden Kross, Bai Ling, and Tommy Wiseau
Link to IMDB
The original Samurai Cop will always be a true classic of B-movies, and 25 years later a sequel has been made. This is a pretty big deal, so I was really excited to sit down and watch this.
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| Joe |
It's not long before Frank locates Joe and asks him to come back to the force and help stop the ninja gangs, but Joe has sworn to never use violence again and has retired his sword and badge. Two minutes later, they are attacked by ninjas and Joe changes his mind! The gangs might have a connection to the murder of his wife, so Joe and Frank team-up once again to kick some ass!
Joe officially reclaims his badge and he also meets a new love interest, the mysterious Milena. The movie begins to reveal its true nature now, and with it my soul is crushed by a massive disappointment.
Large portions of the movie fall into that phenomenon which can only be described as "stuff is happening." So yeah, stuff happens for awhile and most of it just pointless. I can deal with minimal plot, but just staring at stuff gets tiresome.
Even the gunfights and ninja action is boring as hell. It's all stylistically awful looking and there's very little fun involved. There's an abundant use of CGI everywhere. Blood, bullets and often the backgrounds are all created with the cheapest digital effects. The movie is ugly to look at, and the music is even worse! These cheap imitation songs were probably purchased in bulk for $5.
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| Frank |
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| Milena |
The story mostly goes where expected as Joe pulls out his samurai sword to stop the gangs, but it's all downright clumsy and unnecessarily confusing.
Right from the start I could tell the movie wasn't going to feel or look like anything from the first movie, but once the action starts it becomes completely disconnected from Samurai Cop. It fails tremendously as a sequel, but how does it stand as its own movie? Not very well. It feels like an absurd accident created in an insincere vacuum. If not for Joe and Frank, I likely would have lost interest. The moments that work here are few and far between.
"I'm getting too old for this." - Frank
Alright, so what did I enjoy here? It truly was nice to see Joe and Frank again. The actors still have the same chemistry and fit into their roles perfectly. Joe's return out of retirement to become a deadly force was fun, but the movie doesn't focus on that enough. Although there are call backs to the first movie, the writers wisely avoid recreating the same jokes. (There's no silly wig, for example.) But in hindsight, maybe they should have tried to capture some of the same magic, instead of trying to dazzle old-school fans with CGI and porn star tits.
That's the idiot Tommy Wiseau, as one of the main villains. Wiseau is only here as a novelty, and since he refused to read from the script or take direction his performance is annoyingly infantile.
Listening to interviews with Mathew Karedas (Joe) it is clear that the movie did not turn out how he had hoped and he had no creative input. Keep in mind that the director/writer of the original movie, Amir Shervan, died years ago, and the sequel exists solely on the support of a Kickstarter project.
This movie does try, but the lack of a cohesive vision brings a painful artificiality to every aspect.
Be sure not to miss:
- The silly lion head from the first movie makes a few cameos in the background.
- Kale chips.
- Some original characters make cameos, but there's also some B-movie notables added to the cast, like Laurene Landon, Kristine DeBell and Mel Novak. But most importantly, the great Joe Estevez plays the angry police chief.
Internet review:
"This is a garbled and gratuitous mess." - Dan
Should I watch it?
Not really... Just go re-watch the original for the fifth time.
Where can I find it?
I used the vidzi link here.
Samurai Cop 2 gets...(one for Joe, one for Frank)
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