Fantasia Review: The Kick (2011)

After a family of taekwondo experts move to Taiwan, they become heroes when they foil the plans of a thief, and this thief then goes to any length to get his revenge. It actually plays out exactly as many family friendly films do, where the family have their woes, and they need to find the power to stick together. The only difference for this one, is that it has martial arts thrown in the mix. 

If I didn't already make it clear enough, this was an extremely generic film. The script and story was borderline horrible. Within an hour and a half, it was mostly just filled with fight scenes, luckily in all honesty, because that was the best part. The film would set itself out so that there would be unrealistic opportunities to throw in another fight scene every ten minutes. 

I'm definitely no expert on martial arts, so I couldn't judge its quality, but I found it looked pretty well choreographed. The moves were interesting and they changed up the moves throughout the film. Considering there was several fight scenes throughout the film, some were better than others, but overall they were consistently good. My only complaint would be the music that went with these scenes just seemed off, but it wasn't too distracting. 

Considering the film was designed to simply throw in as many fight scenes as possible, the actual story (the glue, if you will) that was trying to hold those pieces together, was extremely weak. There just wasn't much substance to it at all. On one hand you had a son who didn't want to go to the Olympics and instead wanted to be a famous singer. On the other hand, you had a father who forced his family into training the art of taekwondo every day, even when they didn't want to. Apparently, this was just tearing them apart! 

Not to mention, these simplistic storylines were not even given the light of day. I'm sure it's partially because there were more interesting things to show in this film, but when you introduce a plot point, it only makes sense to go through with to the end. The resolution to this film was to cram every resolution into the last two minutes. I didn't care much about the story either, but that was just way too sloppy. 

Although this film did have a bit of fun with its character and story, I feel it should have tried even more to be playful. It didn't need to add in unnecessary stories, especially since it cared as little about them as we did. The script was weak, and although some comedy was thrown in, none of the jokes even warrant a chuckle. I at least appreciated some of the over the top fight scenes. Those scenes at least managed to hold my interest, but it sadly doesn't make up for what little the rest of the film had to offer.