Rating: B-
Dir: Shay Casserley, Simon Linscheid
Star: James P. Bennett, Nicole O’Sullivan, Mikey Graham, Johnny Murray
The list of properly Irish martial-arts films is a short one. As far as I know, in fact, this is it. OK, you could argue a case for Moving Target, in which Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson accidentally buys a six-pack of Beamish in Galway, containing nuclear detonators intended for an IRA splinter group. But it’s about as authentic as a Texan wearing a “Kiss me, I’m Irish” hat. This, on the other hand, is the real deal. It was made by then-teenage star Bennett, on a budget of under ten thousand Irish pounds. The intention was for it to act as a show-reel for Hong Kong producers. Let’s just say, Bennett’s career in Hong Kong never materialized.
It is, basically, as terrible as you would expect, given the resources, amazingly generic title, and near-total lack of experience in narrative cinema of anyone involved. Co-director Linscheid, however, did compete in the bobsleigh events for Ireland at the Winter Olympics that year. So there’s that. The other director, Casserley, brought on board after the original Hi-8 camera broke, shot wedding videos. Most of the cast was recruited from the town of Trim, County Meath – population at the time, around five thousand. For instance, the chief villain, Loughlan, is played by local solicitor Michael Regan, who was given the role in exchange for his help funding the film. But in a major casting coup, they were able to obtain – albeit for only a few hours – the services of Graham, at the time a member of top Irish pop band, Boyzone. Unfortunately, not an actor.
The story is roughly equal parts martial-arts movie cliché, and batshit crazy WTFness. Jimmy Bennett (played by Bennett, you will be astonished to hear) gets out from St. Claude’s Reform School after ten years there, for reasons never explained. Returning to Trim, he wants to discover who was responsible for killing his kung-fu master father. He makes an enemy of Mikey (Graham), the son of Loughlan, who has his eye on local supermarket hottie, Nicola (O’Sullivan). Jimmy rescues her from Mikey’s thugs – including some supermarket-fu (below) – and the couple begin a relationship. It is presumably why we get an extended sequence of them attending a local funfair, because it serves no purpose. It does allow you to wonder how Jimmy lives, since there’s no indication of gainful employment.
After besting Loughlan’s goons on a number of occasions, he is contacted by a monk (Murray), member of a mysterious order who run an underground fighting tournament. As you do. Actually, this is a genuinely amusing idea, taking the Shaolin monk concept from the East, and making it… Franciscan. Why they train Jimmy, or why he is compelled to compete is unclear. Nor why Loughlan cares, to the point of bringing back a guy from Hong Kong, named Seagull, to take part. Just to be sure Jimmy doesn’t win, Loughlan kidnaps Nicola, and sends a note to Jimmy stating, and I quote, “Loose or else.” He manages to get the gist, rather than interpreting it as a comment on his girlfriend’s sexual history.
The subsequent tournament is the most boring part of the movie. The action in general elsewhere is competent, mostly because Bennett clearly knows some martial-arts. He looks the part too, with muscles in all the right places, though has a disturbing fondness for wearing trousers pulled up to his bellybutton. He has clearly also seen too many Jean-Claude Van Damme video-tapes, shamelessly copying JCVD’s moves, such as the elevated splits. But the tournament becomes a lengthy jumbled mess of fights between people we don’t know or care about. The result turns out to be of no significance either. Jimmy still has to head off and rescue Nicola from the caravan in which she’s being held, then face off against Loughlan. It’s as exciting as you’d expect a brawl with an elderly solicitor to be.
I won’t deny, this is entertaining. In part due to unhinged creative choices, like the insertion of incongruous songs, stumbling in from a romantic comedy on the next shelf. Nor do I have a clue what the title means. However, there is a genuine sense of energy here, and this leaves me feeling warmer towards it than I might have expected. Another review described it as Ireland’s answer to Who Killed Captain Alex?. That’s not quite the case, because it doesn’t reach the same, sustained level of insanity. Yet is the comparison entirely inaccurate? Both films are made by people, who decided they weren’t going to let practical difficulties stop them, and that’s an attitude I can only respect and admire.
It feels like it was fun to make, an aspect you can see in the finished product. Most obviously, this infuses the outtakes at the end, including an entirely accidental car-crash they used anyway. Yet there are elements where I’m left to wonder if it was all intended as a deadpan parody. Witness lines like, “You made me look bad. And that’s not good.” Or this exchange between Jimmy and Loughlan, just before their (not-so) climactic battle:
Loughlan: You killed my son. Now I’m going to kill you, just as I killed your father.
Jimmy: You killed my father. Now I’m going to kill you, just like I killed your son.
That is either genius or terrible writing. I will listen to arguments for either.
More than twenty years later, Bennett announced a sequel, Fatal Deviation: Krakatoa, to be filmed during 2020. COVID nuked that, but last update, the movie was now called Triple Deviation, and perhaps including another genre staple: twin brothers. We will have to see if anything comes of this, and whether it can capture the same “can do” spirit. Yet there was already a happy ending for Bennett. While Hong Kong stopped returning his phone calls, he did end up in professional cinema (including an uncredited role in Moving Target). Moving to America, after a spell in construction, he got to work alongside his hero Van Damme in a number of productions, such as Kickboxer: Retaliation. Who said dreams don’t come true?