STRIKING RESCUE - Mark Reviews Movies

Striking Rescue, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 5, 2024

Tony Jaa is a talented martial artist and intense screen presence, and he certainly deserves better than Striking Rescue. It's a movie so generic that even the sight of Jaa's flying knees and crunching elbows walloping thug after thug starts to feel boring.

Little thought was put into this story, which is to be expected, perhaps. Screenwriter Guo Haiwen, who apparently hasn't written any other movie but surely has watched the same type of them over and over, gives us a revenge tale, in which Jaa's Bai An, a Thai man living in China, watched his family be killed by assassins and now is set to kill the people who ordered the killings.

The plot is so thin that Guo and director Cheng Siyi show the scene of the murders of An's wife and child several times over the course of the movie. It starts with that flashback, in fact, accompanied by a montage of Jaa devastating wooden targets with his punches and kicks. It's the one time the actor's blows look genuine, but the unconvincing fight sequences here are probably for the best for the other stunt performers. Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of one of Jaa's attacks, even if it only looks vaguely authentic, apparently.

As An repeatedly recalls the killing of his family (It's not as if the multiple flashbacks reveal much or any new information, either), he sets off trying to find and arrange an ambush for a businessman named He (Philip Keung), whom An is certain ordered the murders of his wife and daughter. After beating up a group of goons who work under the umbrella of He's shady business dealings, An finds a way to track the magnate's moves, putting a tracking device on He's teenaged daughter Ting (Chen Duoyi).

By chance, An's planned ambush is interrupted by another, led by drug dealer Clay (Michael Mao), who is apparently an unofficial partner in He's business and uses shipments from his company to smuggle drugs. Clay's a particularly nasty villain, holding captive a politician who has called out the drug dealer by name on television, along with the man's family, before murdering the politician's wife, forcing the man to choose between killing one of his two sons, and sending the survivor to become a drug mule.

That scene's ruthless in a way that doesn't really fit in with the tone of the rest of movie, which is pretty inconsistent in terms of tone apart from that lengthy bit of abject cruelty. Some of it is deadly serious, as An and Ting, whom he rescues from the ambush, team up to find her father—knowing that An wants to kill He but certain she can change the stranger's mind when the time arrives. Some of it's meant to be funny, such as when An tells Ting to jump from a balcony, only for her to respond that she's "not Tony Jaa," and in the goofy music that plays under scenes of featured comic-relief players.

None of this should matter, because we're not here for elaborate plotting, characters who serve any point other than moving through the plot, or even some clear notice if we're supposed to take any of this seriously or not. No, the whole purpose of a movie like this one is to give us action, to let Jaa show off his moves, and to keep coming up with more excuses to stage even more sequences of Jaa defeating foe after foe.

Cheng technically gives all of those things, but it's tough to call any of them entertaining. It's basically scene after scene of anonymous thugs approaching Jaa one or two at a time, of the action star punching or kicking or kneeing or elbowing each of them one by one, and of that process repeated again and again in slightly different locales.

There's one sequence of An riding a motorcycle through a veritable army of gang members, weaving around them and dodging swings from their metal pipes (Do they keep a collection of pipes just lying around everywhere to be used in such a situation?), but otherwise, it's the same basic choreography repeated across the action scenes. One villain gets to a do a neat trick, using her hatchets to manipulate a shotgun-wielding man like a puppet, but that's the extent of imagination when it comes to the violence.

Striking Rescue is an action movie on autopilot. No one expects much from such a movie, but we should hope for much better than one not even meeting those low expectations.

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