Distant Justice (1992)

Distant Justice (1992)- * * *

Directed by: Toru Murakawa

Starring: Bunta Sugawara, Yoko Nogiwa, Eric Lutes, George Kennedy, Sakura Sugawara, John Fiore, and David Carradine

Inspector Rio Yuki (Sugawara) travels from Japan to Boston to not just take in the sights, but to visit with his old buddy Tom Bradfield (Kennedy), now a police chief. When Yuki’s wife Hiroko (Nogiwa) and his daughter Sakura (Sugawara – Bunta’s real-life daughter?) go off sightseeing while Tom and Rio reminisce about the old days, trouble finds them. 

As they are wont to do, they begin taking photos during their trip. Unfortunately, they inadvertently snap a drug deal going on in the background. It turns out these aren’t just your run-of-the-mill drug fiends – a line (no pun intended) of corruption leads all the way to aspiring senator Joe Foley (Carradine).

After bad things happen to his family members, Rio is raging for real revenge. Bradfield can’t officially help him, so Rio goes rogue. Fellow cop Charlie Givens (Lutes) is there to help, but Rio, in essence, goes it alone. Will main baddie Roy Pennola (Lovelett) stand in his way? Because Rio comes from Japan, will Boston-area baddies feel a new kind of justice? Perhaps…DISTANT JUSTICE?

While it seems to have been written off as a Death Wish knockoff, Distant Justice has its own charm and isn’t any more or less Death Wish-y than many other revenge movies that came in Bronson’s wake. We love revenge movies here at Comeuppance Reviews and like to see them in any form they come in. This one just happens to have a man with an extremely thick Japanese accent as the main protagonist. C’est la vie. 

Distant Justice seems to be Toei Corporation’s attempt to make inroads into the American video market of the day. It features a mixture of Japanese and American actors and technical crew, much like the later (and far worse) Double Deception (2001). We don’t know if Toei thought Bunta Sugawara, who was a big name back home, could somehow translate into being an American star, but – intentionally or not – everything he says is gold. His voice alone is extremely entertaining. 

He makes Gerald Okamura and Mako sound like Alistair Cooke. His accent is so heavy he even sounds like Schwarzenegger at times. Maybe Arnie was the model Toei was trying to emulate of a foreign star with limited English proficiency penetrating our American shores. But Sugawara’s effort, earnestness, and intensity are much appreciated and helped the movie a lot. 

Another commendable thing about Distant Justice is how it completely avoids the Collision Course-esque “he likes hot dogs and he likes sushi” clichés. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of humorous moments throughout the film, however. For a revenge tale featuring shooting, blow-ups, beat-ups, and even rapes, overall the movie is pretty funny. Case in point we have Sergeant Largent (Fiore). Could he be related to Hardcase and Fist’s Warden Borden? We may never know.

Now, it’s not without its faults, mainly in the plotting and pacing departments. You have to wait over an hour to get to David Carradine, and even at that there’s minimal Carradine. But what Carradine you get is good Carradine. 

There isn’t a main, evil villain we as the audience keep checking in with throughout the film. We never visit with Roy as he shouts racial slurs about Rio and admonishes his underlings to make “no more mistakes!” – had there been a strong, central baddie the movie would have had more zest. And there’s an intro with some guys holding up a restaurant and then leaving the Yuki family stranded by the side of the road that really doesn’t need to be there. But fan favorite George Kennedy seems to be having fun, and the outing as a whole is just off-kilter enough to warrant at least one viewing.

Distant Justice is far from perfect, but it’s a pretty unique entry in the revenge film canon. Fans of the genre, George Kennedy, David Carradine, and Bunta Sugawara (if there are any out there in the English-speaking world) are encouraged to check it out.

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty

Blast (1997)

Blast (1997)- * *

Directed by: Albert Pyun

Starring: Linden Ashby, Tim Thomerson, Shannon Elizabeth, Andrew Divoff, and Rutger Hauer

Some terrorist baddies decide to take the swim team hostage at the Atlanta Olympics. Sure. Makes sense. The stereotypical eurotrash baddie this time around is Omodo (Divoff). Needless to say, he has an accent and a team of nefarious helpers, and he’s not afraid to use either one. Foiling their plans is humble janitor Jack Bryant (Ashby). Evidently he was an Olympic Tae Kwon Do champion at some point in the past and he took the janitor job just to be close to the Olympics in some form or fashion. 

While Police Commissioner (that’s all he’s credited as) (Thomerson) is doing his best during this trying hostage situation, seemingly Jack Bryant’s only real help comes in the form of a man named Leo (Hauer), who is wheelchair-bound and has Willie Nelson-esque pigtails. Sure. Makes sense. Will Jack Bryant – who doesn’t exactly give Jack Wild a run for his money – defeat the baddies and save the swim team? Will watching this movie be a total BLAST? Or…not so much? Dare you find out?

Okay, we knew going in that this was an Albert Pyun-directed Die Hard knockoff. Our prospects were looking dim, but we decided to forge ahead anyway – as they say, “expect the worst but pray for the best”. Or something like that. We’d love to say that we were pleasantly surprised, but we simply weren’t. Blast is a dull, bland, uninspired and mediocre run-through of clichés. Pyun seems to have a reverse Midas touch – he always manages to take any material he works with and make it dour and gray.

We’ll try and stay positive. The cast is good, which is one reason we decided to throw (well-deserved) caution to the wind and plunge headlong back into Pyun-land in the first place. We appreciated the presence of fan favorite Divoff, but he’s better in Ballistica. Of course we love Rutger Hauer, but it’s necessarily a sit-down role, and not much of one at that. It’s pretty much the same for Tim Thomerson. Our…hero…Linden Ashby is like Matthew McConaughey but without any personality or life. The swim team girls resemble Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Selma Blair, and Shannon Elizabeth. Upon further inspection, we found that one of them is Shannon Elizabeth. 

The Die-Hard-with-a-janitor scenario was done better with Michael Dudikoff (as most things are) in Virtual Assassin (1995). The problem here is that the baddies wear the same clothing as the staff because they were trying to blend in, so it’s hard to tell who is who during the fight scenes. Said fight scenes could have had much more impact if they were just shot better. Interestingly, John Wick (2014) co-director Chad Stahelski gets a thank you during the credits, so we can only assume anything that makes the fight scenes good are because of him.

Unlike other Pyun movies, things actually happen in this film, and that’s to his credit. Unfortunately, what does happen is pedestrian and colorless. He even manages to muck things up by adding those unnecessary and annoying sounds as transition noises between scenes. Why do some directors think this is necessary? Perhaps the best thing about Blast is the Filmwerks logo, which is a lot like the one from MTV News. Before the movie started, we got excited that Kurt Loder was going to throw it to Tabitha Soren, but, alas, that was not to be. 

Perhaps the more apt title for this movie would have been “Bomb”.

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty

Also check out a write-up from our buddy, The DTVC!