No Retreat No Surrender (1985)'s comments

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vnov

This movie has 'SOUL', unlike lots of recent movies.
No retreat! No surrender!

12 years 1 month ago

I'm assuming anyone else that saw this in the last year chose to do so because Jean Claude Van Damme is top billing and the thumbnail on Amazon (other streaming sites are available) is solely JCVD.
But viewers quickly discover that this is not a JCVD movie and have just been conned. He is in the first 5 minutes then the last 15 minutes. He eventually gets screen time but that doesn't warrant being the only name on the title card, especially when this is a nuts and bolts Karate Kid style B movie.
My comments on icheck are usually warnings to others to stay away from a film (but who am I to influence others?!) however I don't think people should stay away from this movie. It's really poorly acted but the characters are 2 dimentional thus well defined in stock terms; the jerks are real jerks, the hero seems to be nice guy and is suitably naive, the buddy is an impossibly positive energy for the protagonist. It takes the piss with a Bruce Lee role, but this only endears it for the 'good bad movie' it becomes (as noted by other comments above).
Arnold Scwartzenegger appears in 'The Long Good Bye' but only for a 10 minute scene with no dialogue and not much screen time. Therefore he isn't credited. The fact that streaming behemoths used JCVD to garner interest in an unknown property with zero chances of redistribution beyond online fodder for fools like me isn't the movie's fault.
I was furious that JCVD wasn't in it very much but have discovered a mid-80s american B movie with wholesome values about standing up for oneself, a positive attitude to personal fitness (albeit complimented with lots of fat-shaming), a romance that was superceded by a bromance that was actually more convincing and especially intimate and several unitentional laughs which count to a fun experience.

2 months 1 week ago