Showdown in Little Tokyo

Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991)

Runtime: 79 minutes

Directed by: Mark L. Lester

Starring: Dolph Lundgren, Brandon Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Tia Carrere

From: Warner Brothers

Here's a movie I'm basically writing about as I watched it earlier in the week on Encore HD. A big draw for me was that as of now you can only get the movie on DVD, and unless it's been re-released it was only put out in the early days of the format and the picture is full screen and doesn't look that great. While the movie was show 1.85:1 and thus it's not that big of a tragedy the DVD is full screen, needless to say the picture was quite a bit nicer on Encore HD.

As for the movie, it's just like something goofy and slight yet extremely entertaining too. And this is despite Warner Brothers obviously editing things down to such a short runtime. For the most part that doesn't hamper the movie too much. The story is that American cop Chris Kenner (the great Dolph) happened to grow up in Japan; he also happened to see his parents get murdered by a member of the Yakuza. Early on he is teamed up with fellow cop Johnny Murata (Lee), who is partially Japanese and yet dislikes that part of his heritage. They go against Yoshida, a member of the Yakuza who started up a drug ring disguised as a brewery. As this is a movie, of course Yoshida was the guy who killed Kenner's parents.

The movie itself was obviously shot on the cheap and some moments are incredibly fake. Despite that, the film still works as it's like something from the 80's that bled over into the 90's. It's an action-comedy buddy-cop sort of thing so there's a lot of cheesy dialogue and one-liners, which makes it never boring. There's also a lot of nudity, which I'll never complain about. Funnily enough, there's also quite a bit of homoerotic moments, and not just the infamous moment where after seeing Kenner fight in the nude, Johnny out of the blue compliments Chris on his penis size! I'll say that's also an element of the 80's action genre but that's another topic for another time. If you enjoy that sort of thing then I recommend trying to track this down. There are various uploads of it on YouTube so it shouldn't be too hard to find.

I'll be back Monday night and this time I won't review an action movie. It'll be in a different genre, I promise.