An American cop raised in Japan, Chris Kenner (Dolph Lundgren) is the head of the Asian Crime Taskforce in LA.
Though paired with a new partner, green officer Johnny Murata (Brandon Lee), Kenner is determined to play by his own rules.
However, when yakuza crime lord Yoshida (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) begins a violent takeover of the city’s underworld, the mismatched partners have to overcome their differences to take the bad guy down.
I love Commando.
I also enjoyed Night of the Running Man.
Both movies are directed by Mark L. Lester. I am in the bag for a Lester action joint.
For some reason, I have never managed to get through Showdown in Little Tokyo. I think I tried to watch it a few years ago, but I do not remember finishing it - until last week.
I have been on a mini-run through the films of Dolph Lundgren, and that led me back to this movie.
A lot of action stars are not the best actors. Sometimes they have a specific skillset or an on-camera presence that works for the genre.
Man, this movie really throws in Lundgren in the deep end. In the right role, he can be good - see Men of War or even I Come In Peace.
This is early enough in Lundgren's career that he still comes off a little wooden, but the bigger problem is that he is not the right fit for this kind of buddy movie.
Here he is playing a character who is the best at everything - Lundgren is so flat he comes across as an asshole. With the right star, it might have worked - but I doubt it.
Brandon Lee seems to have a better idea of what this kind of dynamic needs. He is bringing the right energy for a buddy cop dynamic - he is all loose energy to contrast with Lundgren’s more zen veteran.
On the downside, he does not have the material. The script makes him ridiculously ignorant - almost all of his lines are asking questions that make him look silly (he does not even realise that Malibu Beach is a different police department that LA).
The key issue is that the movie does not give them any kind of arc - they hate each other until the movie needs them not to.
In any other movie, these issues might work against it - but they are irrelevant to the experience.
I am a fan of short runtimes - this is 78 minutes long and does not need to be longer.
And while the script does him no favours, Lee shines. He is fantastic in the fight scenes, bringing a speed and dynamism that his lumbering co-star cannot match.
Trashy and over-the-top, the film often feels like a comic book, with flashy colours, graphic compositions, and characters styled in extreme versions of forties fashions. It sometimes feels like an R-rated cousin to Dick Tracy or The Rocketeer, only super-violent and packed with nudity.
While the leads are mismatched in ways the film did not intend, it does not miss with Yoshida (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). Hi gives Yoshida a near-diabolical relish for his various misdeeds.
Tagawa cornered the market on Asian villains in the early nineties (most famously, Mortal Kombat). He was so identified with villains that the film Rising Sun savvily cast him as a prime suspect in the central mystery.
His villain is almost all-timer - he does not get a lot to do, but what he does is so extreme (cutting off a woman’s head while he has sex with her and she smokes meth - and while someone else films it!).
Tagawa plays it low-key, giving the character a simmering rage that makes his sudden explosions of violence pop. Because of the shortened runtime, he is truncated to just being a completely evil antagonist who must (and does!) be terminated with extreme prejudice.
The portrayal of Japanese culture is also limited - the film tries to set up a juxtaposition
by having Kenner be the fountain of Japanese culture and enlightenment, with Murata as the brash American youth, but the film does not have the nous to mine this dynamic for anything more than cheap jokes about an Asian American man being ignorant.
Best taken as a piece of sleazy, bullet-riddled nonsense, Showdown is too short to become annoying. Its stars might have better vehicles, but there is something weirdly compelling about this movie's lack of anything beyond forward momentum.
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