When the credits rolled on Death Warrior I thought "maybe it's just not for me" since I'm not the target audience for such fare as I'm not a huge fan of MMA and its sweaty, muscle-bound dudes rolling around on a mat (yeah, yeah, "it's more than that"). But I had to call bullshit on myself, since I've enjoyed plenty of similar movies in the past, and come to the conclusion that a bad MMA-based movie is still a bad frigging movie. This is the exact opposite of the experience I recently had with Undisputed III: Redemption. Whereas that was a pretty kick-ass fight movie this is just a woefully inept, often painful vanity project for kickboxer Hector Echavarria (who also wrote the story and co-choreographed the fight scenes) that felt like a WWE produced flick only with a lower budget, no entertainment value, and a lot more wooden acting.

Echavarria plays undefeated champion MMA fighter Reinero who's planning to retire after fighting one last high-profile match in order to spend more time with his loving wife Kira (Tanya Clarke). After setting up the details of his finale he goes home and we're treated to the first, of two, laughable slow-motion sex scenes. Sometime during the night he's awoken by a sound outside and finds that not only is the electricity out, he also can't get reception on Kira's cell phone. This is the work of some crafty baddies led by the bespectacled Ivan (Nick Mancuso) who proceed to bust-in, tie Kira up, and inject her with a neurotoxin promising Reinero the antidote if he wins a lucrative tournament.

That's about all the set-up you're going to need as Reinero spends the rest of the film having numerous, quite dull, fights against various other MMA fighters while our baddie spends a lot of time yelling, shooting people, and generally going as over-the-top as possible (which only proves that Mancuso must have known he was in a garbage movie and just went for it). There's also a few pointless subplots, double-crosses, and a whole bunch of unnecessary, but generally welcome, scenes of groups of women wandering around topless - one of which has her neck snapped by Ivan after failing to seduce Reinero so the viewer is aware of just how nutty our baddie is supposed to be.

Death Warrior is just a miserable experience from top-to-bottom and the fact they've felt the need to plaster "Presented by Tapout" and bring co-star Quinton "Rampage" Jackson to the forefront despite him having only a few minutes of screen time feels like a desperate attempt to make a least a little bit of cash from those who are willing to drop sixty bucks every month for the latest UFC pay-per-view event. It doesn't help matters much when the fight sequences, which are the main reason such a person would be renting or buying this in the first place, are so poorly staged by director Bill Corcoran with an unintentionally funny scene of Reinero taking on a ninja, a few out-of-place CG shots of people's bones breaking in X-ray, and a squandered chance to have something memorable for action fans by taking the decent idea of having our opponents chained together within a pulley-type device and doing nothing with it. And this is before I've mentioned all the really bad nu-metal they've pumped onto the soundtrack as backing music for every single damn fight.

Having seen a lot of the New Horizons martial arts films of the late-80s and early-90s where the makers felt the need to cast real-life fighting champions in roles I knew going in not to expect anything but stilted, robotic acting. Echavarria isn't actually the worst of the batch with that honour going to Keith Jardine (who can't deliver a line to save his life and just looks silly firing a handgun in the finale) and most of the other MMA fighters are only on hand to get their asses beaten - though Jackson did move on to play B.A. Baracus in The A-Team and do a pretty good job riffing on the character Mr. T immortalized in the television series. Only Mancuso (Under Siege, Rapid Fire) kept my attention and that's only because, like I said above, he's chewing scenery every chance he can.

Being Canadian I've already lived through the cycle of low-grade Toronto-shot action flicks that saturated the market in the 90s (Tiger Claws, No Contest, and numerous Jeff Wincott efforts) and I've even endured the seemingly countless urban action flicks starring various second-string rappers that crowded video store shelves around the same time. Here's hoping that Death Warrior doesn't mark a push by MMA companies to do the same because it's a painful excursion and, as hard to imagine as it is, even worse than Corcoran's various lousy creature features he made for the SyFy Channel (Vipers, to name the worst). (Chris Hartley, 7/3/10)

Directed By: Bill Corcoran.
Written By: Eamon Glennon.

Starring: Hector Echavarria, Georges St. Pierre, Keith Jardine, Rashad Evans.