Bloodsport
What the hell, this is the gayest shit I have ever seen since Top Gun’s volleyball scene. Very progressive, since it’s based on a “true story”.
Seriously, the protagonist only says “I love you” to his bear fighting buddy. The female journalist is only his beard that he saves from being raped by some Saudi dude (I’m assuming, from the red robes).
The scene that clinched it for me is not the toned and oiled male bodies being thrown around, it’s the post “sex” scene, in the morning. The woman keeps her clothes on, but the protagonist is fully nude from the back, flexing his butt, putting his comically small underwear on.
This is all around a yearly underground MMA tournament, this time set in Hong Kong, Kowloon Walled City in particular. It’s invite-only, visitors are screened, there’s a strict “no press” rule, and it’s all hush-hush, but when the journalist gains access by posing as a hooker, she even pulls out a contemporary tape recorder right there on the stands!
Our protagonist is some military dude that was about to get denied R&R privileges, but he goes AWOL, to the government send two bumbling generic law enforcement dudes to catch him. He wants to win the Kumite to honour him mentor, some Japanese dude whose wife and child died in Hiroshima.
He went to America (WHAT‽), remarried, trained his child in “martial sciences” then the kid died of something! Only the protagonist remained, he trained him to his fulled ability.
This backstory all explained in a massive flashback, triggered when the protagonist tells the mentor he will fight for him. The cops only get to the mentor’s house two days after him, even though he literally escaped from a military base!
There’s another American in the tournament, said bear fighting buddy, what looks like a fat Peter Jackson. He drinks beer all day, and still fights like a champ, only going down against the evil reigning champion. That dude is nasty, revelling in hurting the other contestants and KO people in 12 seconds.
Before the tournament, there’s still time for some slapstick chase sequence around Hong Kong, the cops fall into the filthy bay, but then the fights begin in earnest.
There’s an attempt to put national stereotypes on most fighters, but the script is writing checks the choreographer can’t cash: everyone is doing Muay Thai with tweaks, with liberal use of over the top sound effects, usually people hitting leather jackets with baseball bats.
The brackets are not shown, just a bunch of fights in a row, then our protagonist fucks up the evil dude, and he goes home with the cops. The journalist is left behind, filing her story hopefully.
Lady Bloodfight has better fight scenes, but lacks the unintentional hilarity here.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.