Cheetah on Fire
Review
Format: Dubbed VHS
Stars: Donnie Yen, Gordon Liu, Kenneth Lo, Carrie Ng, Jon Salvitti, Michael Woods (what a surprise)

Cops want to capture some bad guys who have a chip which is dangerous.

About as sterile a story as it can get. Lots of gunplay that almost put me to sleep and no kickboxing (good kickboxing that is) until the end, and even then it's not great. I'm not too excited about this film because 1. it's a Tai Seng VHS and 2. it's Tai Seng dubbed.

Luckily, though, the quality of the film isn't as bad as, say, Interpol Connection because this isn't a Filipino production the way IC was (I think it was), and the dubbing isn't aweful, it's just Tai Seng bad.

Kickboxing, like I said, doesn't really happen until the end. Gordon Liu has a small match with a woman (dunno who), and it's not pretty. Liu, surprisingly, looks really weird and it could be because it was undercranked a bit, or because the chick that fought him just sucked. Lots of cuts, stuff is too fast, I've seen this over and over and I'm getting so sick of it with people moving around madly.



Donnie shows up later on and doesn't do anything until the end. Somewhere in the middle there's more bland kickboxing IN THE DARK at some warehouse. Again, too many cuts, useless moves, the stuff you could find in so many other HK gun action films with flemsy martial arts thrown in. Ken Lo is really the only one worth mentioning. He looks good and there's a scene in the beginning showing him training on top of a roof and he looks like a prize fighter as always. As in Crystal Hung, Ken Lo again is one of the 3 or so people who sticks out here.



The last part of the movie, though, is where things pick up pretty nicely. There isn't any finesse to the fights, but still they seem to move somewhat well. Ken Lo fights against Carrie Ng wuith the help of some other girl that looks like Sibelle Hu. Ken Lo, again, looks awesome, and Donnie Yen comes in and fights him. Their fight is EASILY the best looking one with fast hand movements and they actually know how to move back and forth based on what they're doing, and Donnie kills him, that's the end of it. Someone else helps Donnie who almost looks like Andy Lau. He's not very fast but it's decent. Sadly, it's filmed in the dark and it's not too good looking.



It continues from there. Some gun fighting, with war footage because they didn't want to fire guns, and Donnie fights with Gordon Liu, which is the best looking fight here. They're inside a small shack and the scene is well filmed, but short. Michael Woods is wearing a tie dye shirt and takes on the Andy Lau lookalike. Woods does his usual fast kicking and tough guyness. Salvitti is unusually respectable here and looks more like a big, tough soldier than a weirdo because of his flat top and tank top, and I don't remember him being so big... didn't recognize him at first. He performs excellently, some acrobatics here and there, while Carrie Ng is, um, not as good.



Perhaps the dubbing hurt the film, but overall I think that the whole presentation was incomplete. Too much gun play, too many characters, Donnie Yen died which is weird, they act like he's the main character when it's all over, uh, I dunno I didn't like it very much and the martial arts weren't very good (martial arts is singular, but it sounds good plural), even though Donnie Yen was in good form. Just seemed cheap.

5/10 for a subtitled, widescreen version, 4/10 for the Tai Seng cropped dubbed VHS version. I paid too much for this.

UPDATE 10/9 - Rating System Change

2/5 - Lacks the amount of action to nearly justify the $14.99 price at Virgin Records. Damn them.

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