Review of Tiger Claws

Tiger Claws (1992)
A dangerous death dealer stalks the city of New York killing off Martial Arts Instructors
4 May 1999
Warning: Spoilers
Bolo Yeung plays a 'death dealer' - a man who can kill with his bare hands or Tiger Claw Style. In the film Bolo kills off New York's best martial arts instructors and use their belts, trophies, swords as an offering to the gods to prove to himself he is the best there is.

Throughout the film we see hints of Bolo killing off the martial artists, whilst Cynitha Rothrock and Jahal Merhi (both who play New York Cops) try and track him down very, very slowly. The film, in fact, moves so slowly its hard not to fall asleep. The plot although a strong one, fails to get off the ground - we never actually see Bolo killing off the martial artists giving the impression that the fighting was going to build up into an all out action-packed ending - but it never did - instead we get a mixed film that couldn't decide whether it was a Martial Arts film or an Action film - in the end it turns out to be a lame cop film with a bit of martial arts - most of which comes from Bolo.

Jahal, who is on supension seems to forget that he's wearing tight jeans and seems to be able to high kick on demand whilst Cynitha hardly does anything but sit in a car or fight badly.

The fighting sequences themselves are extremely poor - however the training sequences were very good.

Jahal, who infiltrates the Tiger Claw training camp trains with other Tiger Claw students, and finally meets Bolo in a strip joint. There his cover is blown and he, and Cynitha chase Bolo to a conveniently placed Harbour - where they play hide and seek with Bolo.

When the final fight sequences appear, Bolo seems to forget he's a psychotic killer and just stands around and waits to be kicked by Jahal - when Bolo does strike he signals to Jahal to get up instead of finishing him.

I felt this film with its strong plot could have been and should have been so much better. The fight chero-gerophy should have complemented Bolo's extenstive martial arts skills and we should have at understood why Jahal (who only trained for ten minutes) could have defeated a psycho-killer in three.

Out of ten, I'd give this three for effort.
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