Upcoming DVD Preview: Only the Strong
Only the Strong is a ‘90s American kung-fu movie starring a nameless actor who looks like a watered-down clone of Jean-Claude Van Damme, but who apparently is Brazilian? I’m not sure. I watched this movie in Spanish, which really is exactly the way to watch this kind of movie.
It is about a man named Louis who is a master of capoeira, a Brazilian martial arts/dance technique. Capoeira is the theme of this movie and you’d be surprised how many teachers and gangsters are familiar with it!
After a stint in Brazil where he does flips and jumps with his capoeira buddies, who seem way better at it than him, Louis goes back to his old alma mater, Lincoln High. This is a really bad school. It even has a guy with a tiny moustache and aviator glasses who wears a jacket that says, “School Police.”
Louis visits his old drunken teacher, then stops a fight between a normal American black kid and his brother, who is a Jamaican gangster. This leads to the school establishing a capoeira program. Louis asks for the twelve worst kids at the school, who turn out to be mostly pudgy blonde kids, except for the Brazilian kid, the black kid, and the asian kid. The black kid has the Jamaican gangster brother and the Brazilian kid’s cousin is the big gangster boss, who is also into capoeira. Presumably the asian kid also has some yakuza or ninjas in the family that are being held back for the sequel.
Louis’ capoeira program goes well until his constant run-ins with the Brazilian gangster causes the gang to burn down the school, killing one of the kids. Unfairly, the principal shuts down the program and fires Louis.
Louis decides to take his war to the streets. In a stunning move he attacks some guy at a car warehouse. After trouncing him, like ten other guys run out of somewhere and he trounces them too. The best part is that in the Spanish version the audio is not correctly synched during this fight so that when he is attacking with a pipe, you hear the clangs, thuds, and screams well after they are shown on-screen.
He also fights a guy wearing a welding mask. He kicks his ass too, then carefully turns off the welding torch. Then he tells the guys who are still standing that he has a message for their boss and he lights some upholstery on fire and then tosses a gas can into it. Before it explodes he runs away really, really fast, in a totally scared way, and obviously the actor is a little nervous about this stunt.
Some other stuff happens and Louis gets captured. He wakes up on a beach and all the Brazilian gangsters are playing a capoeira rhythm, even the white and asian ones. They light up some kind of weird rune made with gunpowder, but the stunt doesn’t work so everything burns at different rates and it looks pretty shitty. Anyway, Louis is about to get martial arts-icuted, but then all of his pudgy students show up and start doing flips and shit, so then Louis challenges the Brazilian guy to a one-on-one fight, and this time, “There are no interruptions.” IT’S ON! They have a swordfight and he beats the guy. When the bad guys realize that their boss is gonna lose, two of them start pulling out guns, but one of the pudgy kids that you haven’t even seen until this point in the movie kicks the guns out of their hands, really slowly. It turns out that these were the only two of the thirty-plus gangsters to have guns, so that’s that.
After Louis defeats the boss, all the other gangsters stand around shaking their heads really slowly or clenching their fists. They’re pretty disappointed. They don’t seem to worry that the cops are coming.
The kids who got the guns try to high-five and miss, so obviously they didn’t get to that part of the capoeira training yet.
Then there’s a big graduation ceremony where I guess the 12 worst students have managed to pull it together and graduate. Good for them! Then there’s a surprise capoeira ceremony. But not with the students, it’s with the original Brazilian guys who have somehow come to America. Louis starts doing flips and jumps in his suit and tie. He still looks way clumsier than the Brazilian guys.
We go to the credits with the single worst rap theme I have ever heard, performed by Marcel “ICB” Branch. Sample lyrics: “Keep the rhythm, keep the pace, kick the nonsense right in your face!/Flip the negative into positive, and then you learn to live and learn to give!”
THE END! Soundtrack available on Fox Records!
This movie was strongly reminiscent of several classics that I watched with Rudy after class in high school, such as American Ninja 2, and while I was watching it I immediately began composing lyrics for another Orange Jews masterpiece.