KMC Forums - Toyko Raiders

For a martial arts detective story this movie was pretty lame, and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure what made me see it. I’m a huge fan of martial arts and foreign movies, but there’s something about this film that didn’t quite click with me. The storyline was boring, the acting was stagnate and the musical score sounded out of place. However, there are plenty of action scenes that kept me interested. But mostly the story was a huge YAWN, and a complete waste of my time.

The story is simple: Two undercover private detectives are on the case of Ken, an American businessman, who has affiliates with a sinister man named Ito. Ito is the leader to a Chinese mob syndicate. Ken suddenly disappears and his fiancée is out looking for him…but so is everyone else, because he has information about Ito’s crime syndicate. Ito has been peddling counterfeit money into the market to devalue the Chinese yin. Ito’s plan is to increase the value of his assets while creating economic chaos. John & Len, the two detectives on the case, encounter Macy, Ken’s fiancée. At first, they all hate each other, but eventually work together to undercover an even deeper plot: Ken has been blackmailing Ito, and Ken has been having an affair with his wife.

The storyline is an old one, and there’s nothing original about it, but I have to give the writers some credit, because they tried to work a new way to tell the story: cheating fiancée gets wedding jitters and searches for comfort elsewhere…Mob boss tries to make a profit by creating economic chaos, but gets caught and goes to jail. You know, the same old boring story. But there’s a mystery at play in the story which I thoroughly enjoyed despite the old, boring story clique. Half way through the movie I thought I had figured it out, but then it did a complete 180 on me and I was back to ground zero. I thought Ken, Macy’s fiancée, was merely kidnapped by the Chinese mob and he’d turn up later on and Ken would wed Macy and everything would turn out alright in the end. But that wasn’t the case. It gave me a few twists and turns and that’s what I enjoy. However, despite the movie having a good storyline, it lagged in areas. There was a lot of explanation and it got boring at times listening to everyone as they sat around a table and discussed the situation and tried to reason things out. And while the discussions presented me with a lot of information, I often got lost and forgot a lot of what I was told.

As for the acting, I thought it lacked a certain emotional attraction between the characters. The characters seemed unrelenting and cold when it came to Macy’s feelings, when she found out that Ken, her fiancée, was cheating on her with Ito’s wife. John & Len are detectives, and I know investigators must invoke distance from their clients, but I just thought that more could have happened between the characters, like some sort of love triangle or something to that effect, to really spice up the story. Add an x-factor into the mix to really made the characters care more about the other. And that really would have improved the climax with the boat chase, too. But, then of course, Chinese martial arts films are more about fighting and getting the bad guy, than getting the girl. And this is exactly the direction in which the story went.

With everything else aside, I want to discuss the music score. After listening to it several times it sort of grows on you, but overall I don’t know what the writers were thinking adding this kind of a score to the soundtrack. The theme plays more like a Jamaica dance mix than anything else and it doesn’t really work with the movie. It also gets severely overused, in my opinion. It’s fast paced, but lacking in integrity as it fails to integrate itself properly in the movie despite playing during quick martial arts scenes. I think some other type of music should have been used.

Summary: The film was pretty good in the most part, but hardly the best martial arts movie I’ve seen. I was hoping for a lot more than what I got. Instead, what I got what a lot of talk and very little compensation for the time and effort I spent watching this 2 hour film. If you’re in the mood for a interesting, but slow mystery, watch this film. But if you were expecting to see a lot of martial arts scenes with killshot outcomes, don’t waste your time. You’ll be very disappointed.

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