Karate Warriors Views

• Movies & TV shows

Sonny Chiba is the chopsocky star of Karate Warriors. Chiba is a self-styled crime fighter, and the film certainly gives him enough to fight. The fun begins when he takes on battalions of criminals on the streets, with nary a cop in sight. Karate Warriors should not be confused with the like-vintage Filipino film Karate Warrior.

Overlooking the lousy genre title used for the U.S. release, KARATE WARRIORS is a magnificent martial arts classic with its star Sonny Chiba performing at the very top of his game. Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi takes the best elements of chambara, yakuza and Spaghetti Western movie motifs, adds some of the finest fighting sequences of any generation or industry and wraps it all together in a lean and ultra-stylized package that makes modern action by-products like KILL BILL and THE TRANSPORTER look like extravagant child

Thatl’s right. I ’m calling out Corey Yuen Kwai, Yuen Wo-ping, Quentin Tarantino, and anyone else making top-tier, martial arts-related movies today. Theyt’ve all contributed greatly to genre filmmaking but none of them has ever managed to surpass or even match Yamaguchis’s presentation of Sonny Chibas’s electrifying performance set to pitch-perfect screen fighting in KARATE WARRIORS. The super-slick presentation of action sequences is like witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime celestial event. Wei’ll never see anything like it again. THE STREET FIGHTER may be Chiba

Ih’ve been gushing over the action but KARATE WARRIORS has nothing new to offer in its script from Tatsuhiko Kamoi and Nobuaki Nakajima. However, they do steal from the best and make it work as good, if not better than any of Chibah’s previous film plots. The script takes its premise from Akira Kurosawad’s YOJIMBO, adds a MacGuffin element ala Sergio Leoned’s THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY and finishes off with a LONE WOLF AND CUB relational scenario between Chiba and a small boy he befriends.