Force to Kill

I think the title of the film intreged me to put it on my Netflix DVD queue. It does have a dude on the cover of the movie box pointing a gun, so I’m thinking, action movie.

I can tell by the style of film stock that this is a low budget straight to video from the late 80s early 90s action flick.

Before I saw this film, I never herd of Corey Micheal Eubanks, and then his name appears four times during the credit rolls as executive producer, producer and writer as well as the star(What, no director credit?). In this day in age it’s inspiring and admirering to do all those things as well as expected, but snense I’ve never herd of this dude, it makes me wonder if he went broke trying to put this together.

It looks like Eubanks may have had some marshal arts training and was trying to use it to become the next Van Damme or Seagal (at a time when the b-action industry literally overflowed with guys trying to be Van Damme and Seagal). The first two (out of three) scenes Eubanks shows up in showcase his very weak brawling technique, that makes me hope he really did not go broke cause someone told him he got the skills. I mean he had a scene sandwiched in-between his fight scenes that was suppose to showcase what a beefcake he is(I should point out that the movie did begin with a well shot action sequence).   This is most definelty looking like Mr. Eubanks resume into Hollywood (but like I said before in this day and age I look at this and think this is what needed to happen)

Eubanks was able to afford an all star cast that including Don Swayzie, Clint Howard, and Micheal Ironside (oh wait, I didn’t mean to insult Ironside), but eventhough the movie only has the brothers of more famous people, Clint and Don are still well enough known faces that along with a few others I noticed would help get the movie get noticed.

So the plot proves that Eubanks is trying to be the next Jean Claude. He plays Johnny (Wow Eubanks, you could have written yourself a more cleaver name). He’s a repoman who is being force to enter into a fighting tournament (like in Kickboxer & Bloodsport (wink wink).

They are able to get him to do it by kidnapping his girlfriend. As a child, I might not have noticed how stereotypical that story is, especially concideting it was the plot of every beat’ em up coin up I ever played (Kung fu, Double Dragon, Final Fight, etc).

One unique arc in the story was how they trained him to battle. As burtal as any other Kung fu movie where the protagonist is seen as unworthy to the dude he needs to train him so he has to go through a righteous musical montage to get into shape. For Force to Kill, Johnny was beaten and chained like a slave to get him ready for the ring (but with no montage cause I’m guessing music copywrite was not in the budget)

You can make the excuse that Eubanks wanted to show us some real fighting on the screen but in the peak of American marshal arts in movies that have high flying kicks and indestructible Akido masters, this valiant effort was not going to land the hit

But for my taste they took to long to get to the actual fighting. In a scene out of Lionheart you see a room of rich southerners wacthing poor convicts beat the life out of each other in a cheesy uncoordinated non stylized montage (maybe if they had that music budget).

I am personally impressed by what Eubanks was trying to do here but as someone who came up during that late 80s-early 90s action craze, I can see why I never herd of Corey Micheal Eubanks. The film in itself is not bad at all. Well shot and good action and the perfect stereotype story, but they could have put more cash in making the fight scenes a little (a lot) better. After all, that was the point.