Final Round

Tyler Verdiccio (Lamas), a promising middleweight kickboxer with an affable ringside manner, spends his days fixing big bikes. When Jordan (Kathleen Kinmont) gets a load of him at the gym, she brings her Triumph by for a tune-up, and makes a date for later at a hardtimers' bar. Tyler arrives just in time to mop the floor with some of the local bad element, and the fizzy Jordan can't wait to see to it that to the victor go the spoils. After a vigorous bout of lovemaking, they somehow wake up trapped in a warehouse, along with Trevon, a.k.a. "Mad Dog" (Clark Johnson), a former pro running back in an X hat. None of them has any idea how they got there. It transpires that Tyler was surreptitiously videotaped at the bar, and a mad bookmaker named Delgado (Anthony De Longis) has chosen them as his guest victims for tonight's round of sudden death hide-and-seek, to be broadcast worldwide by closed-circuit satellite to top-dollar betters. With little fanfare, a rogue's gallery of assassins playing against the clock are dispatched to track them through a high-security chemical plant, amply protected by a high-voltage security perimeter.

Tyler makes mincemeat of these in serial fashion, dropkicking them into giant fans, appropriating heavy machinery, pulling an Odd Job with the electric fence. Meanwhile, Delgado's one-time mentor and erstwhile nemesis Munro (Stephen Mendel) throws a wrinkle into things by betting half a million on Tyler at 15-to-1 odds, enough to break the bank. Trevon is brought down by a hunter's crossbow, and Jordan is revealed as an insider who lured Tyler here for a price (although she seems to regret it now). But just as Delgado takes matters into his own hands to save his crumbling empire, Munro blasts in with henchmen of his own to collect on the bet, and proposes a brand new game, this time with Delgado in the hot seat.

Although the set-up is suitably high-tech and streamlined, the hunt itself is fairly pedestrian, limited by the repetitive industrial playscape and the day-for-night cinematography. Most of the action gags are pretty lame. And, for all his boyish charm, Lamas's sparring chops are put to shame by even the sorriest Hong Kong actioner. Granted, he may be playing Shakespeare compared to one of Chuck Norris's stock carved-in-wood action figures, but when they spin a camera around him to cheat a swivel-kick, it just makes him look like he's doing Jazzercise. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, adult situations, profanity.) leave a comment