54
188
11
The Butterfly
Tornado Alley
This review may contain spoilers
One sweet martial arts action fest!
If you enjoy martial arts action films and don’t mind a lackluster story---check your brain at the door and kick in your suspension of disbelief, make some popcorn and sit back and be prepared to be amazed by Jeeja Vanin in her first starring role.
Chocolate's storyline uses the most dated of plots. A jealous crime boss doesn't like the woman he loves falling in love with someone else. The woman eventually sends her lover away to save him and has his child in secret. The child turns out to have autism and the woman runs up debts for her care and even more debts when the mom turns out to have cancer. The girl and a boy the mom adopted find her mom's old debt collection book and head out to try and collect the money from some shady characters. Fortunately, the girl has learned Muay Thai and other martials arts from watching tv and video games. I'm going to skip over the magical autism abilities discussion. The story setup is simply a reason for her to drop kick a wide assortment of baddies in ice houses, meat factories, and the Big Bad's headquarters. And punch and kick she does in the most creative ways you are likely to see. The fights started out fairly rudimentary and continued to crescendo until the bonkers, long finale fights that were as brutal as they were graceful.
The writing and acting were mediocre to poor. Just like in a Kaiju movie, when it takes the monster 30 minutes to show up, the only thing people really care about, this film took about that long to get the action rolling as well. The story was nearly irrelevant because the star of this show was Jeeja's astonishing ability to contort her body into a beat down machine, dodging objects, fists, and kicks while delivering punishing blows to men and women twice her size. I read that several actors were injured while making this film and it was not surprising when you see the hard slamming falls people took throughout the fighting. The fight choreography started out slow and breathlessly moved to astonishing.
If you are looking for stellar performances and an interesting, cohesive story, you are likely to be disappointed. However, if you enjoy exciting martial arts choreography, especially with a kickass female lead, this is definitely one to try out.
3/11/23
Chocolate's storyline uses the most dated of plots. A jealous crime boss doesn't like the woman he loves falling in love with someone else. The woman eventually sends her lover away to save him and has his child in secret. The child turns out to have autism and the woman runs up debts for her care and even more debts when the mom turns out to have cancer. The girl and a boy the mom adopted find her mom's old debt collection book and head out to try and collect the money from some shady characters. Fortunately, the girl has learned Muay Thai and other martials arts from watching tv and video games. I'm going to skip over the magical autism abilities discussion. The story setup is simply a reason for her to drop kick a wide assortment of baddies in ice houses, meat factories, and the Big Bad's headquarters. And punch and kick she does in the most creative ways you are likely to see. The fights started out fairly rudimentary and continued to crescendo until the bonkers, long finale fights that were as brutal as they were graceful.
The writing and acting were mediocre to poor. Just like in a Kaiju movie, when it takes the monster 30 minutes to show up, the only thing people really care about, this film took about that long to get the action rolling as well. The story was nearly irrelevant because the star of this show was Jeeja's astonishing ability to contort her body into a beat down machine, dodging objects, fists, and kicks while delivering punishing blows to men and women twice her size. I read that several actors were injured while making this film and it was not surprising when you see the hard slamming falls people took throughout the fighting. The fight choreography started out slow and breathlessly moved to astonishing.
If you are looking for stellar performances and an interesting, cohesive story, you are likely to be disappointed. However, if you enjoy exciting martial arts choreography, especially with a kickass female lead, this is definitely one to try out.
3/11/23
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