Comment by Magic Marmalade:
Oh dear God!
I remember seeing this when very young and thinking it was the most awesome movie ever!
...Bruce Lee, JCVD, and incredible fight choreography.
Sadly not.
Having found it again on DVD, and smiled at the prospect of watching it again after all these years, I watched mostly from the off, open mouthed at just how awful this is.
Van Damme is only in it about three minutes at the start, and the final ten minute finale, giving a truly terrible performance (other than the fighting) as the broadest, identikit cold war Russian evil terminator type adversary, the acting by absolutely everyone is cringeworthy to an unfathomable degree, things happen for no reason I can figure in the story, such as the sensei at the beginning turns out to be the kids father... eh? he moves half way up the country, then suddenly makes friend instantly, who is a break0dancer for some reason, whom also has a fat shamed nemesis for reasons that are never explained, he acquires a girlfriend / love interest out of the clear blue sky, with precisely zero introduction, the Bruce Lee spirit thing is brief and vague at best, it's choppy in the edit, dialogue is awful, script... worse, and is truly stunningly awful.
There are two things, however, that did make me laugh out loud: Firstly, he brings a wrapped present to this "girlfriend" that seems more than casually handled, and turns out to have a live rabbit, as a gift inside (Seriously, I was in tears of laughter at this!
...Secondly, imagine if you will, a "training montage", where our young protagonist is stretched between a bench and another piece of park furniture, suspended between each by only his neck at one end, and his ankles at the other, and he is bending at the waist, then straightening thus... which would be impressive on it's own, except for the fact that his new chum is sat where his intimate parts are, so this rhythmic bending and straightening, and therefore lifting of said chum around his... er... pivot, is quite possibly the most hilariously suggestive spectacle a human could witness :D - I almost died of laughter at this!
The fight scenes are comedically sped up too.
All of which makes for perhaps the most spectacularly bad movie I have possibly ever seen.
You may have to watch it just to bear witness to just how terrible it really is.
