Martial Law is two things. A film that shares its name with the greatest Tekken character. No, don’t bother commenting: you know I’m right. It’s also a buddy-cop movie that cast one of the greatest female martial artists to ever step in front of a camera, and forgot to make her the main character.
If you rented Martial Law from the video shop in 1991, you already knew exactly what you were getting. Mullets. Flying kicks. Warehouse fights. David Carradine talking about mystical martial arts bollocks. And Cynthia Rothrock reminding everyone else on set that she could probably knock them unconscious before they’d finished saying “action.” Put simply, it’s pure bargain bin fodder.
Sean Thompson (Chad McQueen – what a fucking name) is an LAPD detective whose preferred method of policing is beating the absolute piss out of criminals. Which may not sound like anything special is this age of ACAB, but the key difference is that some of the people he fills in are also white. Alongside his partner Billie Blake (Rothrock), he’s investigating Dalton Rhodes (Carradine), a wealthy businessman who’s secretly running a stolen car racket, a smuggling operation, a martial arts school, and a murder business. Honestly, I’m amazed the bloke finds time to sleep.
The film wastes absolutely no time getting down to business. Sean’s introduction sees him disguised as a pizza delivery driver arriving at the scene of a hostage situation carrying considerably fewer pepperonis than flying side kicks. Within about thirty seconds he’s folded half the gang over the nearest piece of furniture. If that doesn’t sound appealing, you can probably stop reading now.
Complicating matters further, Sean’s younger brother Michael (Andy McCutcheon) has fallen in with Rhodes’ organisation after deciding organised crime sounds like a perfectly sensible career move. Rhodes also happens to be a master of the legendary Dim Mak, a mystical “death touch” capable of killing a man with a single strike. I mean, if your villain is played by an actor in his mid-fifties with very little actual martial arts experience, but who somehow keeps getting cast in these sort of films, what else are you going to do but make him capable of killing a man whilst barely moving?
I do love how in Martial Law’s universe, it’s just accepted as a given that there’s some one out there killing people with this ancient “one-hit ko” move. Sean and Billie turn up to crime scenes, see the big purple bruise on the victim’s chest, and proclaim (with total sincerity) that it’s Dim Mak. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world. And the whole time I couldn’t help but think of that episode of The Simpsons where Bart pretends to learn karate and goes on with his “touch of death” bullshit.
Unfortunately for Michael, Dim Mak is no laughing matter. Despite Sean’s best efforts, he gets dragged deeper into Rhodes’ criminal enterprise, something he’s increasingly uncomfortable with. You can tell he’s conflicted because he’s wearing a bad-boy leather jacket and a foppish boy-band haircut, which is apparently cinematic shorthand for I don’t really want to be a criminal. Things come to a head when Michael fails a loyalty test set by Rhodes, refusing to kill a guy who actively hates him and has betrayed him several times already, and the younger Thompson brother meets his maker. To be fair to Rhodes, he does give Michael one last chance at redemption, having him fight his rival to the death. With nunchucks. It’s clearly supposed to establish Rhodes as a ruthless bastard, but I don’t know; there’s something about an older man sitting in his office watching two young men go at it that rubs me up the wrong way.
This obviously enrages Sean – not that you’d know that, because the dude playing him is an absolute charisma vacuum – and sets him on his epic quest for revenge. It’s a pretty breakneck tale of vengeance considering it occupies roughly the final twenty minutes of the movie, so it’s a whistle-stop tour through the usual motions as Sean investigates, infiltrates and dismantles Rhodes’ criminal empire. That’s in between riding around on his motorbike and doing some serious aura farming, because I guess that’s what you do when your real-life dad is Steve fucking McQueen.
Sean eventually turns up at Rhodes’ gym, throws his weight around, has a fight with one of Rhodes’ henchmen – complete with a disgustingly terrible Cockney accent – and somehow manages to work his way into Rhodes’ inner circle. Before long he’s riding around with the man himself, accompanying him on his big final mission: a massive gun sale. Of course, this is all a trap, because Rhodes has worked out Sean is a cop and intends to kill him along with the rest of his henchmen. Still, the speed at which Sean goes from grieving brother to seeming trusted member of a criminal organisation is fucking hilarious. Apparently infiltrating a major crime syndicate is just a matter of showing up at their gym and beating up the right bloke.
So, all in all, Martial Law doesn’t offer many surprises. Would it really be a spoiler if I told you the film ends with Rhodes and Sean duking it out, Sean coming out on top, and even uses Dim Mak to finish him off? Of course that’s how it ends. The interesting thing isn’t where the story goes, but how bizarrely the film gets there, ticking off martial arts movie clichés one after another simply because they’re there.
And then, almost as soon as Rhodes is dead, the film ends. Literally seconds later, we’re done. No aftermath, no real sense of closure and barely enough time for Sean to put his fucking shoes back on. It’s as though the filmmakers reached the end of their checklist, looked at each other and went, “Well, that’s everything,” before pulling the plug. The pacing is therefore all over the place: Martial Law spends most of its runtime setting up its various plot threads, then suddenly remembers it has a revenge story to finish and races through the entire thing in about twenty minutes.
For all its weird pacing and formulaic plotting, Martial Law is at least blessed with a cast that makes the whole thing considerably more entertaining than it probably deserves to be. And that brings us to the real attraction here: the cast. Cynthia Rothrock had already become one of the biggest Western martial arts stars thanks to her incredible run of Hong Kong action films, and every time she appears she completely steals the movie. The frustrating thing is that she’s technically the supporting character, because every time Rothrock starts spinning, kicking and folding stuntmen in half, you’re reminded that this probably should have been her film. Also, I’d absolutely let Cynthia Rothrock get those legs around me. I’m only human.
Chad McQueen makes for a perfectly decent lead, even if he’s hardly overflowing with charisma. He’s likeable enough and more than capable when the fists start flying, spending most of the film looking mildly irritated that criminals keep interrupting what was probably supposed to be a fairly normal working week. David Carradine, meanwhile, appears to be having a fucking wonderful time. Rhodes is one of those gloriously overqualified villains, and Carradine plays him with the calm confidence of someone who has realised he can earn a paycheck simply by speaking very slowly while wearing an expensive suit. He barely raises his voice or changes expression, which somehow makes his increasingly ridiculous behaviour even funnier. There’s a genuine charm to watching Carradine deliver mystical kung-fu bollocks with the same seriousness he might use to explain quantum physics.
One thing Martial Law gets right is the action. There’s no shaky cam, frantic editing or desperate attempts to disguise the choreography; the camera generally steps back and lets people hit each other. The fights are clean, fast and easy to follow, with enough broken furniture to keep IKEA in business. It never reaches the heights of Rothrock’s Hong Kong work, but there’s plenty here to enjoy, particularly when she’s allowed to cut loose.
The film also has that wonderful straight-to-video charm that’s impossible to fake. The saxophone-heavy score sounds like it escaped from Miami Vice, every nightclub looks like cocaine is accepted as legal tender, everybody owns a leather jacket and apparently every disagreement – from organised crime to mild workplace inconvenience – can be solved with karate. The police investigation is gloriously inefficient, with Sean and Billie spending considerably less time gathering evidence than they do battering suspects unconscious. Admittedly, it seems to work.
It’s hardly perfect. The acting is ropey in places, the plot mostly exists to shuttle people from one fight to the next, and the pacing becomes increasingly fucking bizarre once Sean’s revenge mission gets underway. But honestly, who cares? This is exactly the sort of film you’d have rented because the VHS cover promised martial arts, explosions and David Carradine looking sinister, and it delivers all three.
Martial Law isn’t a forgotten masterpiece. It’s a gloriously uncomplicated slice of VHS action cinema, elevated by Cynthia Rothrock’s presence and held together by Carradine’s magnificent ability to make absolute nonsense sound vaguely philosophical. Sometimes you don’t need a complicated plot or a morally nuanced protagonist. Sometimes you just need a bloke on a motorbike, a warehouse full of karate experts, and Cynthia Rothrock kicking someone through a fucking wall.
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