The weekend may have seen the first of a major downturn of things in the wake of the Coronavirus’s spread. But, fear not. While in isolation, you are more than welcome to enjoy our action-packed column, The Hit List, to help bide your time, and there’s plenty of action to go around.
The film eventually rewards you with a fight finale that lives up to the film’s title which adds some excitement to the experience in addition to the entertainment value of watching Kang in action. While his dramatic range stretches short of engaging, his acumen for screenfighting speaks for itself as a filmmaker and martial arts expert who understands some of the basic principles of cinematic fighting. The rest is what you can pretty much chalk up as some seriously-needed polishing in terms of cinematography and scripting, as well as a few other technical aspects.
When David Van Tassell isn’t working on his own projects, every now and then he serves as contributor to Film Combat Syndicate and upon his recent review of actor and martial artist Jino Kang’s latest action thriller, Fist 2 Fist: Weapon Of Choice, Tassell took the opportunity to offer his services for an interview with the film’s director and star.
The movie starts off by hooking in the audience with a brutal action sequence to set the tempo. Action is definitely not something this film shyed away from. Numerous people meet their end at the hands (or barrel) of Kang throughout, and we see a good display of Hapkido and Brazilian Jiujitsu employed. In fact the portrayals of the martial arts in the choreography were pretty accurate and moments of struggle between characters were common in each action sequence. At times things lull because of character moments where they feel fatigue, characters occasionally need to shift to cover for mistakes they have made, and for a film that had a low budget, it goes for some pretty brutal moments to kill and maim its bad guys. Kang behaves similar to John Wick. Everything is straight to the point, functional, and relatively simplistic. At times we see some more fancy moves thrown, but the choreography decides to streamline itself so the plot can keep moving. Shot choice in the action is not flashy, but gets the job done, however at times I felt like that something was either lacking in the general coordination or the editing of the fights as there are moments of ‘Oh I’m a bad guy and my buddy got killed so its my turn to fight the good guy’. They feel a bit disjointed as opposed to flowing smoothly as a cohesive fight scene.
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