dash
Now that I’m actively collecting physical media again, one of the first Blu-rays I bought was One-Percent Warrior. This wasn’t on my radar at all, but thanks to high praises from #ActionTwitter, I decided to pick it up.
The story follows Tak Sakaguchi as a semi-washed-up action star, fed up with the current state of the genre. Finding the approach to fight scenes stale and limiting, he decides to make his own movie. While location scouting, he winds up in the middle of a turf war between two rival yakuza gangs, allowing him to put his fighting style to the test in a real-life or-death scenario.
From the start, the movie makes bold statements on the state of fighting in movies, considering them to be more like dance sequences than actual brawls. We see this with Tak, bored and detached while acting on a wire-work Kung Fu set. He wants to make a 100% Pure Action Film where the actors attack him for real. So, with a slow start, clear disdain for the action status quo, and the build-up of a new fighting style (Zero Range Combat), the movie sets a bar for itself that I’m happy to say it meets.
Most of the fun is watching Tak take down waves of henchmen in brutal sequences. The fight scenes are fast and fluid, choosing to emphasize the efficiency in what’s referred to as Assassin-jutsu over elaborate back-and-forths (at least until the end). Though it takes a little while to get going, once it does, it maintains a fast pace. Each fight ramps up in intensity and stakes, leading to the final showdown. I don’t know how many movies have a fight scene centered around a flashlight, but this one is the best.
The cast is fine. There are two bosses’ daughters, but the evil one steals the film. Everyone else is kind of forgettable, including Tak and the main villain, whose hands do most of the talking.
In the movie, another filmmaker calls Tak’s approach to action “niche,” and the movie kind of embodies that. It’s meta and is as much a movie as a critical statement. What is essentially Die Hard (if Bruce Willis could throw down) is not the kind of movie I’d recommend to someone not already a super fan of the genre. Since the characters don’t stand out, and the film takes place primarily in a single warehouse, there isn’t much to latch onto if you’re not there for the fighting.
But I was, and I dug it.