Film Review: No Retreat, No Surrender

If ever a film encompassed everything good and bad about the eighties it's No Retreat, No Surrender. It seems to cover as many cliches as it can within 90 minutes. But don't think for a moment I'm saying this as a negative...

Tom Stillwell (Timothy D. Baker) runs a successful karate school in Los Angeles. But after class one night, members of a crime syndicate show up to take it over. Opposing this, Tom gets his leg broken by Ivan 'The Russian' Kraschinsky (Jean Claude Van Damme) and up sticks, taking his family to Seattle where his son (and student) Jason (Kurt McKinney) continues his training in their garage, now against his Dads wishes, and finds love, and gets bullied by the Seattle Karate gang.

So far, so Karate Kid. But every Karate Kid needs a trainer. This is where No Retreat, No Surrender takes a strange turn. After a humiliating experience at a party, Jason is visited by the ghost of his idol, Bruce Lee. Played by a guy who looks nothing like Bruce Lee, except for the fact he is Chinese. It's ludicrous stuff as the spirit starts to train Jason into becoming a martial arts master.

Getting past the fact the filmmakers seemed to have hired the first Chinese guy they came across (although Tai Chung Kim, the actor who plays the ghost, was one of the doubles in Game Of Death, after Lee had died), the ghost Bruce Lee comes across as a complete dick. Poking his finger in Jason's face, smacking him around the head, and when finally Jason makes good, he just walks off into a Quantum Leap style wall of light, without saying a word, never to be seen again. What a douchebag!

A particularly brilliant 80's cliche is the fat bully, and No Retreat, No Surrender has a corker. A quick glance on Wikipedia has him credited as 'Scott the Fatboy'. We are introduced to this character as he stands in the street, leaning against a car, eating a massive cake from a plate, chocolate all around his mouth. Later, we see him in a burger restaurant, shoveling them away, shirt covered with mustard. Nice.

There is also the horrifically cliched R.J. He's black, so obviously he can rap on demand, skateboard, breakdance...it's strange that films were still being made in the mid 80s that contained this sort of stereotyping. But at the same time you kind of expect it.

And what of Van Damme? The 'Muscles from Brussels' in one of his first film roles...playing a Russian. The DVD cover would have you believe he's the star of the film, when in fact he's only in two scenes book ending the film. He gets a lot of Van Damme trademarks in there though, the splits, lingering shot of his backside etc., but when he does speak he doesn't make much of an attempt to cover up his accent.

As a side note, Van Damme was going to be in the sequel to this but he decided it wouldn't further his career, and opted not to. He also convinced co-star Kurt McKinney to bail also, and neither turned up for the first day of shooting. Professional behaviour!

The music is also a bit strange. In the American release its's all music from HK films like Project A and Police Assassins, but over here it's whatever is about at the time. Most of which sounds like leftover score from a Hitchcock film. But we do get the epic 'Hold On To Your Vision' which is one of the best (cheesiest) montage songs ever. And the montage it's used on contains possibly the most homo-erotic moment of any 80s film ("You want me to suck on this chocolate ice cream, whilst sitting on your crotch as you use your crotch to lift me up and down? OKAY!")

I couldn't get my head around the final fight though. The sight of Jason just beating the crap out of Jean Claude Van Damme just seemed preposterous to me. Probably watched too many JCVD films - no one treats him like that!

But for all its stereotyping and cliches, and maybe because of these reasons, it's a very entertaining film to sit and watch with a group of people, even if the exact same film with the exact same plot was made 37 times in the 80s.

***1/2

Losing points for lack of advertised JCVD and the cookie cutter characters, No Retreat...is still a cult classic, and tremendous fun to watch. But no one would ever whoop Van Damme like that, though!