Release Year: 2019

It’s almost as if director Andrew Lam just got a few mates together for an exercise in tedium to prove how willing we are to forgive anything for a hit of nostalgia.

A bit like a SyFy Channel movie mixed with an Adkins actioner, ‘Abduction’ is ninety or so minutes of sci-fi silliness coupled with action awesomeness featuring two of the best screen fighters around.

Adkins and Johnson go full force here and while it may not be to everyone’s taste, ‘Avengement’ is another hit for the duo and showcase for the unprecedented talents of Scott Adkins.

It’s still a poor attempt at a revenge flick that is sorely lacking in action and regularly feels like a chore to sit through.

This short, sharp and mostly sweet martial arts vampire actioner may lack budget and a dense narrative but what it does have is oodles and oodles of awesome fight action.

It works perfectly with these protagonists and Lee Sang-Geun throws every cinematic trick and cliché out of the bag to put these two through the wringer.

What starts as an amusing, quirky action comedy goes off the rails around the hour mark, the makers falling foul of the obscure law of Korean blockbusters that means that they MUST have a duration of two hours or over.

It’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying ‘General Commander’ as it’s such a sorry excuse for an action movie with no real positives to offer.

Brilliant. Heart-breaking. Life-affirming. Devastating. These are the first words that came to my mind as the credits rolled.

Over its full running time of a modest ninety minutes, ‘In Full Bloom’ runs out of steam and the attempt at deeper layers of introspection become stilted.

The result is every bit as slick as viewers have come to expect from the film-makers, but severely lacking in genre staples like tension or excitement.

This fourth go around for Yen and director Yip with the Ip saga is as solid as ever from the duo but pales in comparison to the first two instalments.